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Give the people what they want
Offentliggjort 11/08/2006
... and what they have already created themselves
REFERAT: DK-version -
(Article on Knock Knock talkshop session with Derek Powazek, “The people formerly known as the audience”.)
Derek Powazek spoke at 'Knock Knock' about "the people formely known as the audience" - Photo: CFJE/Morten Fauerby |
What happens when you give your audience the power to decide what to publish? US magazine publisher Derek Powazek offered a new insight to this question in a session at Knock Knock, “The people formerly known as the audience.”
"First", he said, "it is important to challenge a few current buzzwords within this phenomenon, including 'content generators' and 'user generated content.'”
“What is user-generated content? That’s a despicable term,” he said. “Only two businesses refer to their audiences as users -- the online software industry and drug dealers. Users are people who use. But we’re talking about creators, people who make things -- writers, photographers, videographers.”
Furthermore, he added, would any writers ever refer to themselves as content generators? He thinks not.
Community-first
Powazek thus invented the term community-first publishing.
“The stuff the community produces exists first and foremost for that community,” he explained. Traditional publishing goes from the top-down, following the “gatekeeper” route: from publisher to editors to writers, and then finally to the audience.
“And at the end of that process,” he noted, “a portion of the printed stuff is spooned to an online site.” The audience has very little say in the story selection or handling aside from letters to the editor. Community-first publishing flips that structure on its head, beginning with the people.
“People make stuff, then they pass it on to a web audience,” he said. “The audience rates or votes on the content. Editors take in stuff that the community [rates highest], and then they assemble it into a final product, giving them a different editorial role. From there, it moves on to publishers, who in this model have very little power.
“Readers have very little time,” he continued. “You have to make sure you are giving them the best stuff. The Internet will not run out of space for websites, and hard drive space and websites are getting endlessly cheaper. The most important [elements] become the interface and then the organization: how do I find the really good stuff?” In the community-first model, the audience plays three main roles, as creators, organizers and consumers. Successful projects encourage all three roles to get involved.
One non-journalistic website that has followed this model with success is Threadless, an online t-shirt shop. All the artwork designs for t-shirts come from the community of readers. Artwork is submitted, the community votes on it, and if a design passes editorial muster, then it turns into a real t-shirt, and is sold from the website. The company ships 1,500 shirts a day, more than 16,000 in a typical month. It earned $6 million in 2005. The three required roles of community-first publishing overlap like water in Threadless.
“The people who rate the t-shirts are the same people who buy them. And the people who buy them are the ones who design them.”
Threadless offers another lesson for bottom-up media: design for selfishness.
“You must give back to the community that makes the stuff. Ask, what will [the community] get out of it? ‘Because it’s cool’ or ‘Because it gives a voice’ will not be enough. Threadless takes the money they make from selling t-shirts and gives it back to the designers. Every week the top voted designs get $2,000.”
Good and bad examples
Another good example can be found in Digg.com, in which readers submit links to articles that can be found elsewhere, and then the suggestions are voted on by the Digg community. The highest ranking stories end up on the front page.
 Derek Powazek at Knock Knock Photo: CFJE/Morten Fauerby | | “Digg is all about social features and promotion,” said Derek. “The whole point is to try to get your story on the homepage. It’s a giant contest, and it’s ego-gratifying. If I post something and others ‘digg’ it, I feel good about myself.” Current.tv, a user-generated online TV station, works in the same way, but Current.tv made a bad mistake. “They said, you upload this stuff and we own it. You can’t put it on your own site or YouTube -- too bad. That caused a bad reaction from the very people whom current.tv wanted to be participating.” |
Thus, rent, don’t own the content, as Powazek put it. “In a community-forward project, the value is the community, not what they produce.” He said that he once at a conference, somebody asked one of Threadless’s founders, “Aren’t you scared that you might piss off your community and they just leave?” He replied, “If that happens, we probably deserve it.”
JPG magazine
Powazek’s own brand new publication, JPG magazine, consists of photos that are first submitted to the website and then go through a peer review process. The editors get involved at the very last step, going over the submissions that received the top votes in the community. These selections are then printed in the magazine. Selected submitters receive $100 and a year’s subscription -- the incentive for selfishness, Powazek pointed out. The magazine is produced with traditional offset printing. It contains advertising and is distributed via the usual channels for consumer magazines.
“Every part of this production process is like a traditional magazine, except for how all the content came to be,” he said.
Show me the money
When a conference delegate asked Powazek where the money is in these ventures, he said the number one revenue source comes from advertising. Big companies have begun to sponsor themes or events or even specific issues of community-first media. Another delegate asked,
“Where do you get the community?”
Powazek said you must design from within a community. “My wife and I started JPG because we’re photographers. We each had photo-related websites, and we had small communities around us already. Our personal circles cared about our idea, and they told their friends, and it spread naturally.”
In the end, participation is the metric, he says. It is the holy grail.
“With community-generated sites like this, it works really well where people are already producing content and motivated to share,” he said. “It works very poorly in cultures of secrecy or expertise. In general, a community of doctors is not going to create a good, [community-first] health care magazine.”
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