PJNet

Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing, who recently closed down his own start-up the Enthusiast Group, explains what went wrong and why. He writes in part:

I feel like I have learned — the hard way — some truths about grassroots content and online community.

One lesson:

building a business on a core of user-submitted content is tough….In hindsight, I think we tried to rely too heavily on user submitted content. Even though a lot of it was really great, the overall experience was weak when compared to, say, reading a climbing or a mountain biking magazine filled with quality professional content throughout…If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content — and I’d mix that in with the best user content…Quality matters…In my view — and based in part on my experience with the Enthusiast Group project — user content when it stands on its own is weak. But it’s powerful when appropriately combined with professional content, and properly targeted.

Here is more about the end of the company.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Citizen journalism, Crowdsourcing, Hobbies, Hyperlocal, Journalism, Journalism Business Models, Media, Participatory journalism, Reinventing Journalism, Social Media, Social Networking, Steve Outing, Uncategorized, Vlogs, digital media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.