CoveritLive Blog

Why 'open chat' won't grow your readership

I try to stick to what I know when I write on this blog.  Sure, I can hold my own in a conversation about advertising or Apple or even health care reform but since I don't work in those industries, I tend to not get too emphatic about my own opinions.

But as we approach our 100,000th live event on CoveritLive, I feel I'm on pretty solid ground when I say this:

OPEN CHAT WILL NOT GROW YOUR READERSHIP

Sorry.  It won't.  Don't let someone in your organization get all wrapped up in 'social' and 'user generated content' and come to the conclusion that if you just build a nice LIVE playground, your audience will grow and flourish in a showering of wonderful open conversation. 

Please note here, I'm not talking about comment boards and forums...those are fine and open is good there.  Also, I'm not talking about a blog/site with 200 loyal readers.  Again, live open chat might actually work there as well for a small audience.

I'm talking about the great blogs and the regional news sites and the big media brands.  Let me break it down for you into a simple list of reasons:

1.  The "Hi, who's here?" problem - Do you really want a live stream with north of 400 people writing lines like this?  The reader didn't do anything wrong obviously so you wouldn't 'warn' them or want them banned for this but really...the value of the content starts to nosedive because of the aggregate impact of a few hundred people tapping away harmlessly.

2.  The "You're a jerk...oh yeah, well F**k you" problem - If you have interesting content, you will draw people with strong opinions.  Eventually in a live setting, they will start having 'side' conversations right in the middle of your content.  You now end up playing traffic cop and get put in the position of having to justify kicking out a reader or two.  Can you say reader backlash?

3.  The "I came here to hear the Boss sing.  Not the shippin' department at Circut City" problem -   That's a parapharse of a great line from Saturday Night Live when Matt Damon threatens other concert goers at a Springsteen concert.  The point is, your content is good because you/your staff writers create good content.  Your readers occasionally (or maybe even frequently) contribute to the content...but they are not the star attraction.

4.  The unspoken evil of the 'self monitored' community - The idea proposed here is that groups will form natually and self monitor thus just build a tool, and let the community take over from there.  Ahh...neat and tidy.  No work for you, all readers happy.  Tick that 'social' box off your list.  Wait.  Go get that Lord of the Flies book you read in grade 9 and dust it off.  You really want to 100% toss your brand into the fray like that?  Need another example, look to MMORPG communities.  Never mind the fact that inevitably, a hierachy/clubby/clique will form and limit the growth to no more than a few hard core participants drumming out any noobies.  Again, you might satisfy a few readers this way, but you've capped your growth.  This point is particularly relevant to the really big brands out there who have objectives to grow their readership by tens or hundreds of thousands.

5.  The math problem - this is the simple killer of live chat for medium/large audiences.  Live college football game, 600 active readers, team scores.  50% of them type in a variation of 'YES' or 'AWESOME' within 10 seconds. Extend that example for the rest of the game.  100% boring, overwhelming and eventually, not engaging.  Now, put the WWE or the Boston Globe in that situation and multiple the audience by 5X or 10X or 30X for a State of the Union address.

Look, all quips/jokes/bad analogies aside...this is important to understand.  There are lot of choices out there involving reader engagement, reader generated content, comments, forums, chat, IM, twitter feeds etc. 

I realize the word 'OPEN' is very popular right now and what i'm suggesting here may conceptually be an issue for some.  So do me a favor before you tell me I'm wrong:  visit any reasonably large (more than 150 people simultaneously) open chat and sit there for 30 minutes.  Better yet, go watch a 'moderated' chat as well because sometimes people get the impression that 'moderated chat' solves the problem (NOTE: it does not fundamentally address any of the 5 issues i've listed above).  Worse, sometimes CiL gets called 'moderated chat' but I try very hard not to force words onto our users.

If anyone can send me a link to a live chat that is really useful for more than 150 people, let me know.  There might be a few once in a while, but more than likely you'll just be seeing a lot of crap.

Pure Fit: CiL + Demand Media

I'm pretty much a 50/50 instinct + data decision maker.  In running CoveritLive from idea to this point, it's probably been more like 90/10 because there was just no data to work with.  So sometime around last October when Dave Panos (then CEO of Pluck...now EVP with Demand Media) reached out to start having conversations about how our companies might be a good fit, I was pretty much ready to sign up then.  To be fair, we didn't really have the usage data to back up my claims that CiL was going to become a 'must have' service for publishers, bloggers, corporations or anyone else with something to say....but I felt some day we would.  And when we finally did, Dave brought me in to meet and increasingly larger piece of the Demand and Pluck management team.  Step by step, discussion by discussion, I started to find out if the most important element was going to be there:

Fit.

People throw 'fit' around a lot.  If you don't want to hire someone, chuck 'fit' at them.  What are they going to say?  VCs use it ALL the time: "Sorry, this just doesn't fit with what we are doing".  Like most things, it is a very meaningful term, but it's been abused so much as a catch-all, that people have grown numb to the word.

But it means a lot to me.  I genuinely enjoyed talking about CiL with these people and didn't really care if they partnered or not.  I was at that level of comfort where it's going to happen or not on it's own merits.  I wasn't going to pretend CiL was something it's not.  We talked about the practical side of the business as well as the incredible upside if a bunch of things fell into place.

In the end, it made sense for us and it made sense for them.

Couldn't be more pleased.  Much more to come in the short and long term.

Special thanks to Dave Panos for getting it going, Shawn Colo for doing things the right way and Richard Rosenblatt for introducing me to turkey nachos and the world of Brooke Burke.

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I am pleased to announce that Demand Media (www.demandmedia.com) has made a strategic investment in CoveritLive.  Although I am personally thrilled to have CiL linked to such a strong leader in social media, let me get right to the point about what's in it for users of CoveritLive:

 

Long term viability – There will always be a good supply of new/neat/cool/interesting web applications out there.  At some point though, you need to move beyond being a couple of smart people with some code.  We could not have found a better investor than Demand to help us 'rise above the widgets' to send a message to our current and future users that CiL is a software service you can depend on over the long term.

 

Strength in Numbers – In working to get this partnership done, I have talked about CiL to pretty much the entire Demand senior management team and they in turn to hundreds of Demand employees.  Moving from four to five smart people with a vested interest in your company to several hundred people with diverse backgrounds will ultimately improve the CiL experience in many ways. 

 

Service & Support - Pluck (acquired by Demand in early 2008) has sales & service people who really REALLY understand social media and work with some of our largest users...and now they're on our team.  There is just no way a company of our size could ever afford to keep this kind of talent on staff.  Some of you have been clamouring for this and others have held back with expansion until we provided it.  Case in point, if you are a medium/large media company or sports league in Europe thinking about how to use the Live Web, Pluck has people on the ground in London who now represent CoveritLive.

 

Content distribution – If you don't know what Demand Studios is and how they are leading the way in the field of distributed content, you should take the time to read up.  Suffice to say, there are an increasingly large number of days where CoveritLive has the most broad range and highest quality of live coverage on the web (think:  NBA Draft, G8 summit, Sotomayor confirmation, Tour de France).  With Demand's help, our users will have the opportunity to get their content in front of more readers in ways they never thought possible.

 

JUST FOR PLUCK CUSTOMERS: Credit the Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe and the CBC for this one...CiL will very quickly provide all Pluck users with Single Sign On (SSO) for their readers so they can use their existing usernames, passwords and avatars within your CoveritLive events.  That is where we'll start...more to come on integration in the coming months.

 

Last, on September 10, I will be attending Pluck's Socialize event in Austin, Texas (http://socialize.pluck.com/agenda/) where I will announce our most significant feature rollout in over a year.  For those of you who might attend, I look forward to meeting you in person.  For those who cannot, I'll announce all the upgrades in a newsletter the next day.

As always, a very large and sincere thank you to everyone who has helped us get this far.

Keith McSpurren

President, CoveritLive

Strategic Investment/Partnership Teaser

My last blog post was on April 27 this year.  It has a fair bit of dust collecting on it now that we're in the middle of August.  The main reason is that I've been preoccupied with something that I wasn't allowed to talk about (and still kind of can't). 

CoveritLive has a new strategic investor.  They are also a tremendously important partner on a number of fronts to help us gain distribution and turn on revenue generation but I'll provide details on that, when, you know, I can provide details.

The biggest short term impact of the negotiation process is that CiL did NOT turn on our expected pricing strategy that I had spoken to a few of you about in person.  I'd apologize, but since you continued to get the product for free, let's call it even.  More seriously, I know there are large numbers of CiL users out there who love our product (and love telling me what else they want) and want to see us around for a long, long time.  Revenue generation is the piece that you all know we need, and have seen no evidence of it yet.  Worry not.  It's all good and next week, I can finally explain why.  I promise all of you will very much like what I have to say.

In the interim, we've been upgrading a bunch of small things in the software that you may not have noticed yet....I'll point them all out in an upcoming newsletter.

Anyway, thank you all for your patience.  It will be worth it (I promise).  Speak to you next Tuesday.

A Case Study for live coverage: The NFL Draft

Like every other software company, we try to promote "data" that clearly supports:  a) our category; and/or/but mostly, b) ourselves.  This kind of activity is on a spectrum in that some people do it so much and so poorly that their information just fades into the background noise.  My favorite example is when someone, inevitably, gets killed on a roller coaster and then someone comes out with their version of "flying is the safest way to travel"...like "more people are killed by garden hoses than roller coasters each year". 

I swear, I saw that one on television once.  What the hell did the garden hose do to kill someone?  And why are you picking on garden hoses?

But i digress.

The NFL Draft, which lasts pretty much two full days every year in late April, provided CoveritLive with a good clean read on our year over year growth rate.  And since there are only a few companies with reasonably large data sets for pure online live coverage, I figured our data could be used as a proxy for the appetite for live coverage/live blogging...whatever you want to call it.

A little historical perspective:  In late April 2008, Twitter was still very much isolated to the technology community (don't get picky on me, only nerds used Twitter back then...take it as a compliment) and was getting kicked around pretty good for outages.   I mention Twitter here because I really believe its existence has been a huge benefit for CiL.  NOT in terms of integrating their software into ours (that's been nice, but it's a feature that most of our users like to have, but rarely use) but more in terms of them acting like a huge snowplough out in front of us getting millions of people used to the idea that knowing something instantly and en masse is now possible.  It has raised the bar again for expectations regarding real time information...and that's good for us.

For CiL, the NFL Draft of 2008 was our first large event that didn't involve a Steve Jobs keynote or a televised political debate.  If live information and perspective from your favorite football writer didn't have appeal, I was quite worried that that would be an indication that CiL was a nerdy widget with limited appeal (I still worry about that btw).  Recognition of our brand was virtually zero among mainstream media companies and the only thing you saw on a Google search about us was my apology letter posted on TechCrunch for our QA failures.  Registered users of CiL at the time, around 3,200.

The data below compares the two days (April 26/27) from the 2008 draft versus the two days (April 25/26) from the 2009 draft.  The first part of the data set is from Google Analytics, the second, our own internal measurement tools.

Visits:
2008:  139,000
2009:  1,994,000

Unique Visistors:
2008: 76,000
2009:  1,151,000

Pageviews:
2008:  240,000
2009:  6,535,000

Time on site:
2008:  3:53
2009:  4:47

CiL Events launched:
2008:  114
2009:  583

CiL data on number of readers clicking on the Watch Now and Replay:
2008:  68,000
2009:  778,000

Registered CiL users as of the draft day weekend:
2008:  3,200
2009:  32,000

Ok.  So, web data is good for trends, not pinpoint analysis.  The number of events launched for instance is 5X growth while the pageview growth is like 27X.  Also remember something critical:  NO ONE HITS REFRESH DURING A CiL EVENT TO DRIVE UP PAGEVIEWS, IT ACTUALLY UNDERSTATES THEM DRAMATICALLY.  Clearly the presence of the Yahoo's, major market newspapers and actual NFL teams have a lot to do with bigger readership/event.  Here's all I draw from this and maybe it's useful for some of you struggling to understand whether or not to implement/expand/try CoveritLive:

• Readers have a huge and growing appetite for the content you can create with CiL;
• They will stick around for a long time on your site and keep coming back (look at the Visits v. Unique Visitors data) for events with a long duration;
• Twitter has NOT killed the need for depth of coverage or live blogging...anyone who makes that statement isn't thinking the problem through...it has grown it massively by acting as a promotion tool to drive people to your events;
• If you tried CiL a few times in mid-late 2008 and your readership was not enough to keep you interested in putting the effort in, maybe rethink that given how fast reader expectations have changed;
• The upside is still tremendous:  only 2 NFL teams (the Seahawks and the Eagles) used the software this year and both brought in huge readership...a forum or a message board will not meet the need..everyone is starting to figure out how to use these kinds of tools.

I have a pretty unique seat to watch some of this stuff unfold.  Many of you out there have talked about this kind of topic with me and I'm always happy to engage on the subject.  As a side note, it looks like I will be spending more time out of the office in front of media companies talking about the category and what our data tells us.  New York is this week and my boondoggle U.K. trip is May 9-13.  I can't go everywhere all the time, but love it when I have the chance.  Ping me if you think a visit to a conference panel or your company might help advance the conversation.