On branding

[chipotle]

Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech featured some thoughts from Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget et. al.) and Mahalo, on branding. Craigslist, the venerable classified ad service, blocked a site called Craigsfindr which searched all of the Craigslist sites at once. From Craigslist’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter that this is “adding value” to their website—they don’t want somebody scraping their data and taking it out of their sandbox, period.

This led to discussion of why, in the past decade, somebody hasn’t built something “better” than CL. One can argue that the Web 1.0-ness of Craigslist is a feature, not a bug, but it’s not hard to imagine genuine improvements to the searching and cataloging functions, not to mention the potential benefits of a (moderately) open API. So why hasn’t that happened? To do a rough transcript from the episode:

Jason: In order to get people to switch a service, it’s going to require hitting them somewhere between three and seven times with a marketing message, it’s going to require having a product which is 50%, 100% better. You can’t just make it 10% better. There’s zero switching cost, theoretically—you just type in a different domain name—but it means you have to market the heck out of it to displace it. If someone wanted to start “This Seven Days in Tech” and it was a show that was twice as good, it’s gonna take them a couple years to do it.

Leo: Thank God! […] Didn’t Tom Peters say that a product, to supplant another product, has to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but ten times as good as an established brand? You know what you have. Why take the chance unless I can see a significant improvement? And Craigslist does the job.

I couldn’t help but think about this in relation to some discussion I’ve been in on two friends’ journals recently, which those of you who read some of the same LiveJournals I do will have no doubt seen—the discussions about art archive sites. It was asserted that the “Big Brand” in our fandom isn’t very good. It isn’t: the software is slow, fragile and under-featured, and one might argue that spending $16K in donations on a new system with three single points of failure is, shall we say, sub-optimal. So why, my friends asked, aren’t better alternatives succeeding?

Honestly? I think Laporte and Calacanis nailed it. Here’s my own takeaway bullet points; visualize PowerPoint slides if it feels more Web 2.0 for you that way.

FA provided the right service at the right time: they took the deviantArt model of a gallery merged with social networking (home pages, blogs, comments, watch lists) and targeted it squarely at this fandom. It turned out a strong demand wasn’t being met. Whether or not you think FA met it well, before they started nobody else was meeting it at all. Yerf was dead, FurNation was in shambles, VCL remained state of the art for 1994, and dA was perceived as hostile.

But in barely more than a year, everything had completely changed; when you have no competition, going from zero to majority market share is easy. Anyone post-FA doesn’t have that opportunity. A “competing” site has to succeed at what Calacanis outlined above. Are any of them?

• “Significant” improvement is subjective, but the responses I saw suggested that by and large people didn’t feel the new sites were two or three—let alone ten—times as good as FA.

  • ArtSpots is, to me, the best gallery site both technically and in terms of “added value” service, but it’s made a conscious choice to limit its content in both form and rating. I don’t see this as a problem, but limits are limits. If you’re a writer, AS isn’t even under consideration; if you’re an artist who does both all-ages and mature work, you can just put it all on FA.

  • The wincingly-acronymed Furry Art Pile has an innovative approach to organization, but based on what people were saying in discussion, “different” isn’t translating to “better” for most people. It may not be translating to worse, either, but just being different isn’t good enough.

  • YiffStar has an art gallery in addition to their story archive, and they also have a second domain, AnthroStar, which essentially filters the porn out. (Did you know that? I didn’t either, but that goes with the next “slide” about marketing.) But there’s no compelling technical reason to switch from FA to YS; the gallery features seem less about expanding YS’s audience than about expanding the services for their existing audience. That’s a big audience, mind you, but so is FA’s—and my comments about FAP three bullet points down apply here, too.

• Back to Calacanis: “hit [the audience] with a marketing message” means getting a banner, an AdWords ad, a press release, something that makes the case for checking the site out in front of people’s faces, and “three to seven times” means just that: you can’t just do it once or twice, you have to keep doing it. You might object that in this fandom word of mouth is the real advertising, but two points. One, there are places to advertise just to the fandom, from web sites to con books. And two, if the discussion here or on tilton’s journal was the first time you’d heard of ArtSpots or FAP or AnthroStar, what does that say about their name recognition?

And last but not least, two personal observations:

• With the exception of YS, all of these sites—even FA—are comparatively new, and as outlined above, FA has a tremendous “first mover” advantage now. Even if FAP did everything right it would take years to build up significant mind share. And even though it’s doing some seriously cool technical stuff behind the scenes, FAP’s interface and marketing could both use work.

• FurAffinity has positioned itself as allowing erotica without explicitly (ha!) promoting it. By contrast, FAP says: hey, we know you’re really here for the porn, have a front page full of tags that sound a touch fetishy even when you’re not logged in and seeing the really “adult” stuff. Yes, I know that the audience for porn is huge—but from a marketing perspective, “we have everything including porn” trumps “we have porn and also clean stuff.”

So here’s the two million-dollar questions, figuratively speaking:

• What would a site have to offer to be better enough to get people to switch?

• What would be the best ways for that site to get sufficient name recognition to bring in the switchers?

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

This has been nagging at me for a while, obviously, because I just now thought of it. But I used to check Yerf's Recent Art as a daily bookmark, and while there are now plenty of similar alternatives (like ArtSpots), I no longer look at them, despite bookmarking them and saying I'll check them.

I have finally figured out why: Livejournal has become my "recent art" bookmark. A lot of artists upload here. I can do my own content filtering. It's not restricted to furry-only. And with the syndication option, I've added a lot of artists off livejournal who use Wordpress or something else that creates RSS feeds to my list. This way I not only get art, if I can to I can get context, because a lot of artists talk about their work when they post it, much more than they ever did in a thumbnail description of it. Plus I can interact with them directly about their uploads. I suppose FurAffinity might have come close, but it would be a duplication—a furry-specific one—of something that Livejournal already does for me without having to worry if someone's posting something furry enough.

So, I think furry art archives are dead for me. This method works better.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

This is actually something else that FAP -- as much as I keep ragging on their acronym -- arguably does 'right': it automatically generates RSS feeds for, well, just about everything. You could get a recent feed list of all uploads, featured uploads, any individual artist, tags, or even search results. The generated feeds include the title, thumbnail, and whatever commentary the artist left, as well as tags the artist gave the image.

ArtSpots also has a "recent art" feed, but it doesn't look like it has the same feeds-everywhere approach, and while it looks like it's supposed to generate per-artist feeds, at the moment that seems to be broken.

(Bemusingly, I don't think either of them supports the feed that I'd actually want most: a single RSS feed of new works from your "watch list" of selected artists.)

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

http://chipotle.artspots.com/favorites/rss

The only one that's truly broken right now is per-artist, and that's going to be fixed at the next push. There's also artspotsrecents which uses the recents RSS feed to pull into LJ. A handful of folks use that too. :)


EDIT: This also brings up an amusing observation. About 4 out of 5 times, every time someone asks of ArtSpots, "I wish it did this.." I point them to the spot where it does that. I need to figure out some way of getting these features more into the open. :)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

RSS feeds are "discoverable" for people who want to use them, generally speaking, I think -- the RSS icon at the top of the page should logically be the RSS feed for whatever's on the page. This is actually what I missed checking to see if ArtSpots had a "generate an RSS feed for this search query" functionality, I confess; with FAP, there's an RSS feed on the search result page, whereas it looks like in ArtSpots you turn a search result page into a "fetch folder" first and then subscribe to that. (I presume that's what the RSS feed on the fetch folder page is supposed to be; I created one now as a test and the XML file is empty.)

If there's a way on either ArtSpots or FAP to create a single RSS feed of "new stuff from my watchlist," it's not obvious to me, I'll admit. I'd assume that if such existed, it would show up somewhere on my watchlist page, e.g., "http://chipotle.artspots.com/favorites/watching".

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

The URL I gave you was your own "new stuff from my watchlist" rss feed. :) At least in Safari, going to your Favorites page shows the RSS icon up in the URL bar.

username.artspots.com/favorites is the recent art from those you are watching

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Apparently the actual problem in this instance is: I am a dork.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

artspotsrecents - 'Cuz I tend to check LJ more than I do recents as well. :) Also, as I always point out, Artspots is not limited specifically to furry art, just happens that most folks post it there, but anything is allowed that's illustrative in nature.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Oh, right, I remembered there was some restriction. :)

Anyway, the RSS feed is cool, but a lot of the artists who post to Artspots already have livejournals, which means if I comment on their art on their journals they'll see it, whereas the RSS feed creates a black hole. :)

It's a cool feature, though! It's just... not as interactive as I've become accustomed to. And these days, one does discriminate based on interactivity. :)