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

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

That's the one thing I've been trying to say about ArtSpots for a while now. Back when it first started and folks were all excited, there was a lot of hype between early adopters as that year's FurtherConfusion approached. I went to the con expecting to see a small-but-notable marketing blitz: table banner, printed flyers, notes on bulletin boards, a sign, something. It was a rockin' concept and I figured once the word got out folks would flock to it.

Instead, I saw absolutely nothing about it at the con. Supposedly there was at least a little advertising, but nothing I ran into at least. Nor have I seen much attempt to market it since then, save for lots of livejournalling word-of-mouth during this FA kerfluffle.

As a techie, I really don't like the whole sales/marketing/business side of life. But even I recognize it's wickedly important. I still wonder how well AS, FAP or other sites would do if they gathered up a few donations and went on a marketing binge centered around a major convention or two...

[megadog.livejournal.com]

As one who prefers his, ahem, erotica to be of the written form, the one killer-app for me would be a decent and flexible text search.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I'll take the 6 sigma position here; I'm far from the norm, even in furry.

Furry artsites are, for me, entertainment. They are a routine operation I do on my computer between playing a game and checking my email. As such, it's a force of habit where I go and what I do. Such habits are hard to break.

I LIKE FA's organization. I LIKE their interface. I log in, and anything new by my favorites is available with one click of a button. If I want to see the most recent art of everyone, again, one click of the button. If I want to see just a single artist, it's two clicks. It's simple, direct and easy to use. And the community feel where everyone can comment and reply to comments adds a great deal. I have found good artists I never heard of by examining who commented on some piece of work.

As a tech head, the backend stuff interests me. But as a furry looking for art and wanting to stay in touch with people I admire, I couldn't care less about the back end. If it works, it could be on a VIC20 and I wouldn't know. So any issue about reliability and single failure points are moot until the failures actually occur (from a fannish consumer POV rather than a developer producer POV).

Right now, FA has a good combination. To leave, someone will have to take that good combination and make it better. I don't see how that's possible - unlike people in Redmond, I don't believe that adding everything is automatically improvement. Many programs were fine as they were (Word) and then got wrecked by adding bells and whistles that nobody wanted and nobody understands (Word2007). When FA screws up the interface like dA (still don't know how to do squat there) then I will want to move. Until then, I like the a) community present, b) already large base, c) ease of use, and d) acceptance of stories and music as well as art.

If it's not broke, I don't fix it.

Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

In no particular order, here's what a site would have to provide me to encourage me to leave FA:
1) Content locking. I hate to say it, but right now I'm looking at publication of Beautiful World through SofaWolf, and that means that at least until the first rounds of negotiation are complete, I probably ought to keep any piece of the work not already posted somewhere out of the limelight. That means a friends-only or alpha-readers-only or X-group-only filter on my posts so I can ensure that a few people can see them for preview and everyone else has to wait until the final purchase. Ideally, this feature would let me set on a post-by-post basis who's in and who's out.
2) Text markup at least as intelligent as BBcode if not pure HTML insert. Right now, FA offers embedded text and links to .rtf and .doc files, but if I want to post HTML-markup, I can't unless I cleverly rename it a .doc, and even then it's not embedded in the page itself. It's instead a link available for download, which isn't what I want. I want to be able to embed markup in my documents and then have them pre-rendered so people don't have to go through the extra step of downloading and reading with an alternate tool.
3) A collaboration forum intended to bring artists of multiple stripes together. "Writer seeking artist," "lyricist seeking musician," "animator seeking scripts," et cetera. I want to start encouraging mixed-media presentation and so far everyone partitions individual categories and lumps in mixed-media presentations into other categories that might or might not be appropriate.
4) The true challenge: an audience large enough to justify deleting my FA account. I don't want the hassle of having to maintain multiple "art site" accounts and then remember who has what rules about posting where. I want one account to which I can point people that serves as a gallery of all my work. In fact, I have one, on my website, but I'm too lazy to code up the content-control features I want, and I dislike the idea of getting a second LJ account and giving them any more support just to have the content-control.

Speaking of publications, by the way, I'd like to talk with you at some point about Why Coyotes Howl and the "publication through SofaWolf" process if you have the time. Beautiful World may have just expanded slightly in scope, and before I settle on a publisher I'd like to hear some thoughts from you on your experiences with them.

Kristy

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

Absolutely correct on all points. The rules of business and of marketing apply even when it's fannish, nonprofit projects like furry art archives. Conventions also rise and fall for similar reasons. It's too big a fandom for word of mouth alone to give you a boost, although it's still a sure way to kill you. FA got people on its side during their tech troubles and kept them informed, so they waited for it to come back up. Now I think people are MORE invested in FA than before, although alternatives saw a spike in traffic, it will be that much harder for them to compete going fowards.

[bfdragon.livejournal.com]

When it comes down to it, it's just a matter of where I can find more of who and what that I like. I don't want to have to deal with checking 40 different sites when I come home in the evening, I just want to take a nice look around then be done. Until a large group of the people I like migrate (or a new one shows up) it's pretty much what I'm calling home, despite it's flaws (how did gerbil ever end up a species in the browse before gryphon did? o.o).

Honestly, I still miss the centralization that mailing lists offered, it was all right there in my mailbox waiting for me, but, that seems to be a thing of the past now, oh well.

[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.