Category: All Interviews

OPW INTERVIEW — June 25, 2006 — Strange things happen when you empower people. Myspace allowed users to create freeform profiles…85 million users later, Fox has their arms wrapped around them. Linux asked for a little help with a new OS. Jimmy Wales pondered on the wealth of the worlds encyclopedias, and set the framework for a new, open encyclopedia. Here's the story of Wikipedia. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. How can you empower YOUR online personals site users more?  Have faith, step back, you might be surprised what happens. – Mark Brooks

What's  your personal story?
One of the interesting things, I guess, is when I was growing up, I had a fairly unusual education. My mother and grandmother had a small private school and there were four kids in my grade, 1st through 8th grade. In fact, what they did was they grouped us into two groups, so 1st through 4th grade, and 5th through 8th grade. There were about 16 kids in the classroom but at different levels. So that enabled us to work at whatever different levels we were interested in. We had a very open-ended time schedule and we were able to just study and learn whatever we wanted. I spent a lot of time pawing over the encyclopedia. Self-directed learning has always been a part of my upbringing.

I was in grad school studying financial economics and did PHD coursework, but I never did finish the PHD. I got an interesting job in Chicago as a trader. When I was in grad school I started looking at the Internet and looking at free licensing software. I was watching the growth of the free software movement. At first I was skeptical but then we saw that very high quality software was being created. All the software that really runs the Internet is Apache, Linux, PHP, it's all free licensed software that's written primarily by volunteers, programmers just working together collaboratively. So that was really the genesis of the idea for a free encyclopedia, to get a bunch of people together to collaborate on something useful. We've seen them do it in the software world and it works so, let's do the same thing with encyclopedias.

Was there one particular turning point for you?  When was Wikipedia started?
Wikipedia was started in January 2001. Before this, for two years, I had the previous project Newpedia. Newpedia was a completely different social model. It was very top down, very structured, very hierarchical – seven stage review process for articles, academic committees and so forth. And it was also a failure. It was a failure because it wasn't very fun for the volunteers. It was way too heavy in terms of controls and mechanisms and that's actually one of the things, as you said, Wikipedia was intuitive but it was born out of really a reaction against that.

In the Newpedia days we engaged in a lot of thinking about how to control things, how to make sure nothing bad got in. Wikipedia goes in totally the opposite way. So I said, "Let's just be as open as possible. Let's rely on accountability rather then gate keeping." By that I mean, every edit is visible, every edit is trackable to your account, people can see what you're doing, so there's that public oversight of the work that the community does. Wikipedia is really a reaction against the gatekeeper approach, which was to say, "we'll just make sure that only good people are involved and that people know what they're talking about before they get started." That was the gatekeeper model, which didn't work.

Did the information drastically improve on Wikipedia at a certain point, once you had a critical mass of contributors?
It's not about the number of people, it's about the quality of the individuals who are working on Wikipedia. We had more work done in two weeks on Wikipedia than we had done in two years on Newpedia. Even in the very early days, there was some pretty good articles, within a couple of weeks, where people got excited and edited together and kept adding information and rewriting and smoothing out, and then it just kept growing from there. I can't really point to any particular point and say, "Once we had this, then we were that." It grows and improves over time.

Is what you've created at Wikipedia magic, or is it reproducible?
I think the core principles are reproducible. You've got to think really hard about being in a social environment that's friendly and polite and helpful. Of course, with humans it's never perfect,there's always some fighting and things going on. There's always some sort of drama going on in the community.

Craigslist is a fine example. It's a community of friendly, helpful people who help each other out. And then, of course, I now have my company Wikia and people are building communities there using the same software (hosted) that Wikipedia is built on, but it isn't encyclopedias. It can be anything, political, fan sites, whatever, and those communities are also seeming to be very successful. I think it is reproducible.

I think that what we're going through right now is a period of learning about how to design software that let's people interact in friendly ways online. A lot of behaviors online, bad behaviors, come from incentives that are implicitly in the software that people don't necessarily notice. So a lot of my thinking about these kinds of issues is how do we keep the software in a state that encourages good work and gives a means of deflecting negative energy.

How do you make money?  Why did you go non-profit with Wikipedia?
So Wikipedia started sort of on the side as a hobby and it just became bigger and bigger and there was a real demand from the volunteers that it be a non-profit. The idea of a free, neutral, high quality encyclopedia as a reference standard, written by a community…it just seemed to make sense as a charitable project.

I now get a salary from my work at Wikia, so that's how I make money. And then the foundation gets money primarily from small donations. So the bulk of the money that we get is $50 to $100, or 50 to 100 Euro. It's basically thousands of small donations that pay the bills and keep us going.

You're building an incredible reference to a world of information. Are you friends with Google?
Yeah, I mean I talk to people at Google. Of course, there are tons of people at Google who are fans of Wikipedia. We don't have any kind of formal business relationship or anything like that with Google.

What does the future hold for Wikipedia? What partnerships are you looking for in 2006 through 2007?
We just announced that we hired an Executive Director for the foundation. We're trying to mature the organization. Our organization is very small and a little chaotic because we're swamped all the time with all the crazy stuff that's going on with Wikipedia growing so fast. The main kinds of partnerships we're pursuing are around helping people to reuse our content commercially or non-commercially, so that involves us taking a careful look at how it can be used that are consistent with our community values. You should take a look at http://personals.wikia.com. It's not very active but it's kind of interesting. There's a few people working on. It's very limited at the moment but they're basically thinking about how to do personals in a community way.  An open ended system. It's a neat experiment.

Mark Brooks: Wikipedia is modeled on the ancient campfire; the wise sharing information with the community around them. Jimmy knows open learning. He grew up in an open learning environment. It took that immersion in freeform thinking to drive the creation of the radical, rather counterintuitive Wikipedia. Web 2.0 will model (and improve on) many of the social dynamics that we experience in the real world. At the core of some of the best rising star web sites are two common themes. Trust and empowerment. (Wikia, Jotspot and Wetpaint are the top hosted wiki services available to the public).

OPW INTERVIEW — June 16, 2006 — WAYN.com is unique as a social network. They are successful and are making money with a paid VIP membership. Here’s my recent interview with WAYN.com Director/co-founder Peter Ward. – Mark Brooks   

How is WAYN different from other social networks?
WAYN has always been aimed at trying to differentiate itself from its competitors. We are based on locations, travel and people's whereabouts. Second, we are a premium social networking website service.  We offer a premium paid membership; 7 pounds 50 a month through 60 pounds a year for the VIP membership offering. Whether a user chooses to upgrade or not there is still a justifiable reason for using the service, which means we get the best of both worlds where we can trade a lot of traffic. 

How did you start WAYN?
WAYN was the vision of my colleague and good friend Jerome Touze, who came up with the initial idea when he was traveling on the Pacific Highway on the West Coast of the U.S. with some friends.  He just had a brain wave. Given that you meet so many fantastic people on your travels, wouldn't it be great to have a website where you can see where all your friends are at any given time. Jerome mulled over the idea and when he came back to the U.K., after we both had our year out to travel, he finally upped and told me about the initial idea. Of course, I'd just been vacationing around the world for one year, so I immediately related to that and suggested that we meet up over a beer to discuss it in more detail. We met up in Poland and in Marseille to brainstorm and brought it to one of my good friends, Mike Lines, who at the time, was the Systems Manager for Friends Reunited. We obviously needed somebody to build the website. We developed the proposition to a point where we could pitch it to Stephen Pankhurst, founder of Friends Reunited. He immediately fell in love with the idea and agreed to give us initial investment capital. We incorporated in September 2002 and went live in May, 2003. We then spent the next year and a half or so tweaking, testing, customizing, and improving the overall customer experience. 

WAYN has a paid membership level. What was the thinking behind this?
On the basis of advice received from Steve, we decided to implement a paying membership service offering. He felt that this was something that was crucial in order to ensure that we have a profitable and viable business model. We tailored the service around how we could differentiate ourselves from our competitors by setting up a premium service. It wasn't until March 2005 that we really hit the point of critical mass. In March 2005, we had 45,000 registered. Now we have almost 5 million members. We grew by over 400,000 last month alone.

How did the site grow so quickly?
First of all, the idea was to set up the service which allows you to keep track of your friends from around the world based on where you've been, where you are now and where you're going. We realized that the real value was to combine that with the ability to make new friends. Different people from different places. And, of course, if you plan a trip in the future wouldn't it be great to see who else is going to be in the same place as you. Say, if you're going to San Francisco in two months time, you could actually make some friends who are also from say London and hang out with them while you're there.

Does advertising work for growing social networks?
I think actually that it probably does if you have a good visibility over your customer acquisition costs.  There is also an argument that says it can work in terms of developing a brand. One of the most important things in business is to create a trusting and well recognized brand and advertising can help play a part in that. 

How is the membership program working out?
The membership program is working well for us. We are seeing membership numbers rise and we see a huge opportunity to increase that number over time by providing more payment mechanisms as well as more services which can be added on top of the existing membership platform.

Users can SMS each other through WAYN.  How is the SMS option working out?
SMS as you know has been very popular in Europe and is a very well understood method of interacting.   But interestingly, in the last few months we've seen an increase in the U.S. I think there's a lot of interesting talk about mobile content, a lot of investment, and a lot of hype. I think clearly the future is there. We're seeing a lot of the new handheld devices coming out, which are going to support access to the Internet. The key is to provide customers with a service that's useful and relevant. SMS has a lot more opportunity to grow before we even reach for web enabled or download-able outlets.

What's the future of social networking?
I think the social networking space is at a point of critical mass already. There are so many providers trying to take a piece of the action. Some of the traditional ways that social networks have grown to popularity are becoming diminished in value. Everyone has received an invitation from their friend inviting them to join one site or another. People are quite familiar with the services that are out there today and are trying to just understand what the best type of service for them is. The next wave of social networks will be very focused networks on target audiences, whether it'd be farmers or people who are interested in flying planes.

What are your plans for 2006 through 2007?
As you know in the Web 2.0 world things move at the speed of light and we're always trying to keep ahead of the game. One of the things that we're looking into is how we can set up a closed social network, which is secure, for the teenage market. The service will be only for those between the ages of 13 and 19, will be by invitation only and only existing contacts will be able to contact each other by default. So watch out for that one. Also, we're developing more advanced tagging for photos and we will provide our members with the ability to show streaming video, and to customize their profiles, with a focus on travel and lifestyle. We're doing a number of other things to strengthen our brand position in the travel and lifestyle sector and are looking to partner with some of the leading players in that space. We want to be the number one online membership community for those interested in travel and lifestyle. Social networking is a very exciting industry to be involved in and we couldn't have been in it at a better time. Good luck to all the people who are trying to be winners in this space.

OPW INTERVIEW — June 9, 2006 — You’ll often see Nate Elliott (and David Card) cited in the press. Nate works for Jupiter Research and is a leading analyst for the online personals industry (internet dating and social networking). Here’s my interview with Nate…  -  Mark Brooks

Who’s numbers does Jupiter Research use these days?  Do you use ComScore?
No, it’s generally all of our own numbers.  A lot of those numbers come from consumer surveys both in the U.S. and in Europe. In the U.S., we run more then a dozen consumer surveys every year and in Europe we run several per year as well covering the six major European markets. In addition, we have access to ComScore data that we sometimes use supplementally. But typically, we just use that data to double check what we get back from our surveys. In addition, based upon our survey data and executive interviews, as well as, publicly available information, we craft forecasts for the online dating industry in the U.S. and 17 European countries for the next five years.

How does the European online dating market look?
It’s doing very well. It’s still growing pretty strongly and we see it continuing to get stronger over the next several years. Similar to the U.S. market, the European market is starting to slow down. The good news is we don’t see the sudden slow down happening in Europe that happened in the U.S. In the U.S., we went from nearly 80% growth to less then 10% growth over the course of two years. In Europe, the transition will be much more gradual in large part due to the fact that we’re dealing with several markets instead of one single market and the fact that there are several markets across Europe that are maturing at different rates. That will help insulate the industry from the kind of sudden slowdown that the U.S. industry has seen.

What is the fastest growing market in Europe?
Well we look at Southern Europe as the fastest growing region within the online dating market. In particular the Italian market will more then triple between 2005 and 2009. It will be the fastest growing market in Europe over that period of time. The Portuguese market is also going to grow very quickly.  Overall, we see the online dating market in Europe more then doubling between 2005 and 2009.

Which services do you think will be most successful in the future?
The ones that are successful today in terms of revenue and users, and I respect that they’ll continue to be very successful, are Match.com and Meetic. They appear to be just about neck and neck in terms of revenues. Having spoken with them, I think they both have intelligent strategies to try and grow their business as this market starts to slow down a little bit. So certainly those two would be the most notable and they would be the ones that everyone has to keep their eye on.

Are there any notable and fast growing social networks in Europe?
There are a handful but I think it’s important to distinguish between social networks and online dating sites. We have more data out of the U.S. than we do in Europe because the social networking phenomenon is stronger in the U.S. then it is in Europe. But generally speaking, our surveys indicate that online consumers are not interested in using social networks to find a date. We’ve also found that online daters don’t leave dating sites for social networks. When we ask online consumers what functions of a social network are interesting to them and what functions they’re using, finding date’s scores very low?  Most people, in fact, like to communicate with their existing friends on social networking sites.  It’s more about people talking to the folks they already know, than going out and meeting new people. 

Where do you see mobile dating going in Europe and the USA?
Well, mobile dating is really interesting. I’m as interested as anyone else to see if any of the online dating sites can turn mobile dating into a serious stream of revenue. One of the slightly disturbing things we’ve seen from Meetic’s public statements is that their mobile dating revenues have actually declined as a percentage of their overall revenues over the past couple of years.  Now, in part, that’s because their overall revenues have grown very aggressively and their mobile dating revenues have been growing less quickly. I’m not sure the dating sites can count on it as a serious revenue driver over the next several years but I absolutely encourage the sites to look at the mobile platform and be well positioned in the future, if it does turn into a revenue stream. In the mean time, it certainly is an interesting way to drive people back to their website, which is where they make their money. 

How about video dating? Is there a future?
We don’t have a lot of data on people who are interested in video dating. The last time we asked that question in a survey was about two years ago and we saw very low interest at that point in time. It stands to reason that interest would have gone up just a little bit over the last couple of years but speaking from personal opinion, I can’t see video becoming a very important part of online dating over the next several years. If you remove a level of control from online daters about what their appearance is, I think a lot daters will be cautious about using webcams. For that reason alone, I think the uptake might not be significant for video dating, but again, we don’t have a lot of recent data on it.

What overarching trends are you seeing? What’s hot?
All the prices have gone up at the dating sites over the last year and a half. It’s more of an issue in the U.S. where user growth has slowed to a crawl.  To continue growing revenues they have to raise prices.  Yahoo Personals went from $20 to $25 to $40 depending on which service you take. These prices aren’t high but they’re higher then they used to be and I think in some cases they’ve become a bit too high.  As a result, you see fewer users who browse online personals. So, certainly raising prices is one way to generate more revenue from the consumers and it does increase the average revenue per user but if it comes at the expense of growing your main user base, then that’s a concern. I think there is an opportunity right now for some companies to come in and undercut the leaders. Dating sites that are sort of on the second or third tier, that are looking to challenge the leaders, may take advantage of the high prices that the leaders are currently charging, either by permanently undercutting the leaders or offering more creative pricing. 

One of the things that we’ve seen out of the U.K. that we like is the short term subscription. At Dating Direct you can subscribe for just a couple of days for a reduced price. It gives you a chance to communicate with someone; it gives you a chance to reach out to someone if you like a profile without making a large financial commitment.  But by registering for just a couple of days, for about the price of a drink or two in a bar, you’re potentially widening the number of people who would be willing to pay for your services.

What message would you like to leave the executives with?
The good news is, the industry is growing. Even at this stage where we’re seeing a few bombs in terms of use, it’s a big industry, it keeps on growing, and largely the services are doing things right. It’s just a question of defining strategies and growing the paid user base. I look forward to watching the leading data sites refine their strategies and seeing their continued growth as an industry.

OPW INTERVIEW — Apr 21, 2006 — Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist.  He has built a powerhouse of a site on sheer utility, pure goodwill, and a groundswell of viral word-of mouth.  Craigslist is a phenomonen and Craig is one of my personal heroes. 

Why did you start Craigslist?
In 1994, I was at Charles Schwab; I was evangelizing the net for the brokerage industry.  I saw a lot of people helping each other out and I figured I should do some of that.  So, in early 1995, I started a simple 'cc' list telling friends about arts and technology events, and that was the beginning of Craigslist.  People asked for more stuff on the list and I did that and I got more feedback and I did that, and that's how it is today.  We talk to people, we find out what's needed, what's useful, and we do it.

Just how popular is it now?
We seem to be getting about 4 billion page views a month and we're in a little over 200 cities, in five countries with 8 million posts per month.

How is the international growth coming along?
It's slow but steady.  We are not where we want to be in terms of multiple language support.  But, word of mouth works and we're growing.

Why not charge for personals?
Five or so years ago, I asked people what it was they'd like us to charge for. The answer was to charge those people who would otherwise be paying more, for less effective advertising.  The consensus was to specifically charge for real estate and job postings.  So we charge brokers and recruiters and soon will charge apartment brokers for rental listings in NYC; although they specifically asked us to charge them to improve quality by reducing redundancy.  People have suggested we charge for personals as a way to improve quality; but there's no consensus.

What prompted the creation of the casual encounters, more racy personals section?
People saw that racy ads were being posted in the more conventional sections and people suggested we trade an alternative to get the racy ads focused in one or two places.  And that's been effective.

Have you been surprised by some of the posts?
These days, after about 13 years in San Francisco and going to the Fulsom Street Fair; not much surprises me.

What do you have in store for Craigslist and for the personals section in 2006?
We do need to improve customer service by giving more power to the people who use our site.  People can help us out by flagging inappropriate ads for removal.  We are driven by the culture of trust we've developed with our communities and that's another reason why I personally do full time customer service and I intend to do substantial customer service only as long as I live, after that, it's over !!

OPW INTERVIEW — Mar 31, 2006 — Michael Birch is the driving force and chief architect behind six community Web sites over the last decade. He launched his latest venture, Bebo.com, with his wife and brother in 2005. In seven months it attracted 22 million members and ranked as the largest social networking site for students in the U.K. Prior to Bebo he started Ringo.com, one of the first social networking sites, which was sold to Tickle.com. Birch earned his BS degree in Physics from Imperial College, London.  Now he has his sites on the U.S.!  Here's BEBOs story… – Mark Brooks

What is  BEBO's founding story?
BEBO was started in January, 2005 as a photo sharing – contact sharing website and we re-launched it in June 2005 as a social network.  I met my wife, Xochi, at the original site, a bar, in the UK when she was studying abroad and I was in college in the UK.  We thought it would be cool to create a social networking site around a global community of students in English speaking countries, and so that led to Bebo.  It proved very early on to be very popular with universities, colleges and schools, particularly in the UK, Ireland,  US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.   

How big is BEBO now and how did you get it to grow so quickly?
BEBO has a total of 23 million registered members.  We're turning about 60 million page views a day and it's growing purely through word of mouth. We're growing incredibly quickly, setting new page view records every week now.  We've never done any marketing. The key to the success has really been creating a product that has proven to be popular. We spent a lot of time thinking before we started developing a product, how it should work and how to make it popular and what features to include and as importantly, what features to exclude from the finished product.  All the sites we've worked on in the past have always been focused on word of mouth marketing so that's kind of been our specialty.  We initially took that approach simply because we had no money to spend on marketing and word of mouth marketing is a
matter of time rather than money to get it right.

What other sites have you worked on in the past ?
We worked on a number of them since 1999.  It's been a matter of learning through trial and error.  So, we did 3 sites in the early days which had a mixed degree of success but never had the kind of exponential growth that's so critical.  The first one that actually took off was BirthdayAlarm.com, which is the web's largest birthday reminder service with eCards.  We monetized it, and with reminders as well as eCards it seemed to be very viable.  The second site that was successful was Ringo.com in 2003; Birthday Alarm was 2001.  Ringo was a very early social network.  We actually launched it 13 days following the day we heard about Friendster.  We started negotiating to sell the website 3 months later .  It was 6-months from launch to closing the sale-a very stressful time.  It took off very quickly, and after 2 months we had over 400,000 members.  At the time, Friendster had a million members.  We were second largest in the market at the time.  The reason we sold it, was that it was growing so quickly that we either had to get a VC or we had to sell it.  We couldn't afford to scale it.  We weren't profitable with Birthday Alarm at that time, the way we are now.

Why is BEBO better than MySpace or Friendster ?
The advantage of being late in the market is you have the benefit of hindsight.  So we managed to apply everything we learned from Ringo and analyzed what was and wasn't successful on Myspace.  So it was really just getting the product right and the subtle details of the product that make it work.  One of the major distinguishing factors is that from the start we've focused on schools and universities in 6 key English speaking countries-US, UK, IE, CA, AU & NZ.  Also. we offered, from the very beginning, unlimited
photo uploads.  I think we were the first social network to actually have no limitations on photos.   The other thing is that we offer the 'White Board,' where you can actually draw directly onto your home page.  The third is that we allow customizations through skins, rather than people having to write their own HTML to customize their page.  They can select new skins and their page can be updated through a click of a mouse.  We've struck the right balance between customization and personalization, without allowing members to break pages and create a bad user experience.   Bebo is fundamentally different from anything else that's come before it.

How do you see social networking evolving and where is the money to be made?
We're still in the relatively early days of social networking and if you look at the rate at which social networks are growing today, they are growing faster than they ever have.  Friendster was considered in the early days to be a fad, and now social networks are a huge order of magnitude larger than they were 3 years ago.  I think they still have a long way to go.  They are becoming much more, and will continue to be much more of a utility over time rather than being a pure gimmick, they're actually providing a genuine benefit.  For example, Bebo is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland, and a Beboer contacted us from Ireland and told us that before Bebo, the folks in his small town in Ireland were not getting along, and then everyone independently joined BEBO, and thanks to Bebo, they got to know each other and their friend's friends, and now there's a community spirit in the town pub that wasn't there before BEBO. 

In terms of making money, the leaders in the social networking space, to date, have been rather uncreative.  It's very early in this process and social networking creates a new advertising mechanism for brands to reach the tough to reach 13 to 30 year old demographic who are spending more time online and skipping TV commercials with TIVO.  Also, major brands will be able to do amazing word of mouth marketing campaigns on social networking sites that are only possible to do on social networking sites because influencers are already connected to all their friends.which makes the word of mouth that much easier.  But, you've got to engage this audience which means doing much more than the traditional banner advertising that's still the common form of advertising on SN sites.   

So, I think the income breakthrough hasn't happened with social networks yet, but it will happen in time.  The likely direction that will take will be with product sponsorships and product placements rather than traditional banner advertising.  The advertising and promotion needs to be more integrated into the social network itself, and targeted.  And, we're beginning to go in that direction with Bebo.

How is the partnership with Skype working out and was it the uptake like?
Skype is proving to be very popular on BEBO. We faced the option of developing that feature in-house, which is by no means a trivial application to develop, or to do it in partnership with someone else, so we chose Skype. Since we launched this co-branded partnership with Skype 3 months ago, 360,000 Beboers have added the Skype/Bebo co-brand to their homepage; and we're seeing 6,000 new Skype/Bebo registrations each day now.. 

What do you have in store for 2006-2007?
That's a long way ahead in terms of social networking.  The product road map is very aggressive.  We are aiming to making an improvement every week; which may be just a small feature or a major release.  We're doing this very carefully because we don't want to add features which are not popular.   One of the major features coming up is a music product.  We've been taking time to do this because we want to do this the right way and make sure we have the very best of breed. 

We're growing phenomenally quickly in the UK and Ireland.  I haven't actually seen the official figures, but the internal figures show that we're the largest single website in Ireland.  I'm doing radio interviews literally every day with radio stations in Ireland about the phenomenal growth of BEBO.  In the UK, we are probably ranked 25th in terms of overall websites, but we're growing at about 10% a week.  In the U.S. we are growing at a similar rate.   Our focus has been on the UK and Irish markets, and we're now just turning our attention to the US market as well.