Extinction
by Joe Tucciarone
Monday, April 28, 2008
Users Demand Expertise To Web Sites
IF the Internet can make anyone a star, can it turn Barnes & Noble into one, too?
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Michael Falco for The New York Times
Daniel Weiss, publisher and managing director of Quamut.com, likes “the old-fashioned publishing model.”
The bookseller has taken another step beyond its traditional business into the online publishing world, recently introducing Quamut.com, a site that teaches Web users things as diverse as the basics of football and how to build a Web site.
“Building a how-to Web site” is not on the list, but judging from the number of such sites in existence, it may be easier to do than follow a football game.
Quamut is the latest brand to capitalize on what company executives said is a growing disinclination among Web users for amateur how-to advice. Whether that distaste can support a departure from Barnes & Noble’s core business is a question investors will be considering.
“I think it’s an interesting experiment,” said Sameet Sinha, an Internet analyst with the JMP Group, an investment firm. “But Quamut will have to show up very well in searches, and doing that will not be easy.”
Quamut differentiates itself from the long list of how-to sites like eHow, HowStuffWorks.com and, to a lesser degree, About.com (which is owned by The New York Times Company), with a somewhat novel twist: selling downloadable documents of its otherwise free content.
For instance, users who want to know how to make sushi can browse through 15 pages of information, like “how to make sushi rice,” or can copy and print the information themselves. But Quamut sells a more polished version in a six-page color document for about $3. The document, in PDF, is without ads “and all the junk on the sides,” said Daniel Weiss, Quamut’s publisher and managing director.
“We think these will be a very big hit,” Mr. Weiss added. “We’ve seen some evidence of that already. People often need that physical reference.”
This is far from the first online publishing initiative for Barnes & Noble, Mr. Weiss said. Among other efforts, the company in 2001 bought SparkNotes, an online study guide series, and helped oversee the expansion of that business into a wide range of topics. It also began printing and selling the guides in its stores.
Likewise, some of roughly 1,000 Quamut documents are offered at Barnes & Noble stores, in laminated form, for about $6. Quamut pays a team of freelance writers to create those, which are vetted by the company’s editors.
Those writers, Mr. Weiss said, are the other important difference between Quamut and sites that rely on self-proclaimed experts or site visitors for content. “We actually don’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd,” he said. “This is the old-fashioned publishing model.”
That model has established About.com as one of the most popular sites on the Web, and helped prop up the Times Company’s revenue. About, which offers a combination of how-to content and less pedagogical information involving urban legends or political humor, pays 721 freelancers to cover some 70,000 topics. Roughly 41 million people visited the site last month, according to comScore Networks, an increase of about 3 million from December.
According to Martin A. Nisenholtz, the Times Company’s senior vice president for digital operations, About.com’s authors go through a monthlong screening process that gauges the candidate’s expertise in the subject and writing skills, and culminates in an ethics quiz and a background check.
“There are a variety of ways people can get their questions answered online,” Mr. Nisenholtz said. “But particularly when you get to very important categories, like health and others where the risk of getting a bad answer is very high, documents from experts are important.”
Mr. Sinha, of the JMP Group, said the most successful how-to sites are likely to include expert advice, as well as advice from other readers and a format that allows questions and answers.
That is closer to the approach taken by Demand Media’s eHow, which is among the oldest of how-to sites. Investors poured about $30 million into the site during the online boom, only to see the business falter when advertising revenue dried up. After Demand bought eHow two years ago, it continued to build the site’s content with professionally written articles, but also allowed users to chime in with their own advice.
Now, about 15 percent of the site’s 200,000 articles are written by amateurs, who are paid if their articles attract enough attention (like one on how to duplicate Victoria Beckham’s hairdo). The site is also incorporating professionally made videos from another Demand how-to site, Expert Village.com.
“It’s what advertisers want,” said Gregory Boudewijn, a Demand Media vice president. “There’s so much low-quality user-generated video; if you can raise that bar, it can help transition those dollars from offline to online.”
But sites that are still heavily text-based can thrive in the how-to category, if Squidoo is any indication. The company, which began operations two years ago, now attracts about 3.3 million monthly visitors, according to comScore. (Squidoo says it has twice that number.)
Users peruse about 500,000 pages written by 175,000 people, who earn an undisclosed share of the revenue Squidoo makes from the authors’ pages. That money comes through advertising and commissions Squidoo receives when readers click through to a retailer’s site to buy something. Seth Godin, Squidoo’s chief executive, said the company has five or six employees, and is profitable.
The new competition from Quamut and others, Mr. Godin added, is not particularly worrisome.
“The competition is between whether someone should be an Amazon reviewer, or write a page on Facebook or build something on Squidoo,” he said. “We see this as a huge ocean filled with lots of people with stuff they want to do.”
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Michael Falco for The New York Times
Daniel Weiss, publisher and managing director of Quamut.com, likes “the old-fashioned publishing model.”
The bookseller has taken another step beyond its traditional business into the online publishing world, recently introducing Quamut.com, a site that teaches Web users things as diverse as the basics of football and how to build a Web site.
“Building a how-to Web site” is not on the list, but judging from the number of such sites in existence, it may be easier to do than follow a football game.
Quamut is the latest brand to capitalize on what company executives said is a growing disinclination among Web users for amateur how-to advice. Whether that distaste can support a departure from Barnes & Noble’s core business is a question investors will be considering.
“I think it’s an interesting experiment,” said Sameet Sinha, an Internet analyst with the JMP Group, an investment firm. “But Quamut will have to show up very well in searches, and doing that will not be easy.”
Quamut differentiates itself from the long list of how-to sites like eHow, HowStuffWorks.com and, to a lesser degree, About.com (which is owned by The New York Times Company), with a somewhat novel twist: selling downloadable documents of its otherwise free content.
For instance, users who want to know how to make sushi can browse through 15 pages of information, like “how to make sushi rice,” or can copy and print the information themselves. But Quamut sells a more polished version in a six-page color document for about $3. The document, in PDF, is without ads “and all the junk on the sides,” said Daniel Weiss, Quamut’s publisher and managing director.
“We think these will be a very big hit,” Mr. Weiss added. “We’ve seen some evidence of that already. People often need that physical reference.”
This is far from the first online publishing initiative for Barnes & Noble, Mr. Weiss said. Among other efforts, the company in 2001 bought SparkNotes, an online study guide series, and helped oversee the expansion of that business into a wide range of topics. It also began printing and selling the guides in its stores.
Likewise, some of roughly 1,000 Quamut documents are offered at Barnes & Noble stores, in laminated form, for about $6. Quamut pays a team of freelance writers to create those, which are vetted by the company’s editors.
Those writers, Mr. Weiss said, are the other important difference between Quamut and sites that rely on self-proclaimed experts or site visitors for content. “We actually don’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd,” he said. “This is the old-fashioned publishing model.”
That model has established About.com as one of the most popular sites on the Web, and helped prop up the Times Company’s revenue. About, which offers a combination of how-to content and less pedagogical information involving urban legends or political humor, pays 721 freelancers to cover some 70,000 topics. Roughly 41 million people visited the site last month, according to comScore Networks, an increase of about 3 million from December.
According to Martin A. Nisenholtz, the Times Company’s senior vice president for digital operations, About.com’s authors go through a monthlong screening process that gauges the candidate’s expertise in the subject and writing skills, and culminates in an ethics quiz and a background check.
“There are a variety of ways people can get their questions answered online,” Mr. Nisenholtz said. “But particularly when you get to very important categories, like health and others where the risk of getting a bad answer is very high, documents from experts are important.”
Mr. Sinha, of the JMP Group, said the most successful how-to sites are likely to include expert advice, as well as advice from other readers and a format that allows questions and answers.
That is closer to the approach taken by Demand Media’s eHow, which is among the oldest of how-to sites. Investors poured about $30 million into the site during the online boom, only to see the business falter when advertising revenue dried up. After Demand bought eHow two years ago, it continued to build the site’s content with professionally written articles, but also allowed users to chime in with their own advice.
Now, about 15 percent of the site’s 200,000 articles are written by amateurs, who are paid if their articles attract enough attention (like one on how to duplicate Victoria Beckham’s hairdo). The site is also incorporating professionally made videos from another Demand how-to site, Expert Village.com.
“It’s what advertisers want,” said Gregory Boudewijn, a Demand Media vice president. “There’s so much low-quality user-generated video; if you can raise that bar, it can help transition those dollars from offline to online.”
But sites that are still heavily text-based can thrive in the how-to category, if Squidoo is any indication. The company, which began operations two years ago, now attracts about 3.3 million monthly visitors, according to comScore. (Squidoo says it has twice that number.)
Users peruse about 500,000 pages written by 175,000 people, who earn an undisclosed share of the revenue Squidoo makes from the authors’ pages. That money comes through advertising and commissions Squidoo receives when readers click through to a retailer’s site to buy something. Seth Godin, Squidoo’s chief executive, said the company has five or six employees, and is profitable.
The new competition from Quamut and others, Mr. Godin added, is not particularly worrisome.
“The competition is between whether someone should be an Amazon reviewer, or write a page on Facebook or build something on Squidoo,” he said. “We see this as a huge ocean filled with lots of people with stuff they want to do.”
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