It looks like Jason Calacanis’ gamble is paying off with his paid Netscape Navigators. At the time, I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea. It is like hiring an entire marketing crew and not needing to pay for their health insurance or 401k. Nice cheap labor for Netscape and some extra spending money for the people doing something they were already doing for free.
Netscape has decided it is time to add some more Netscape Navigators to the payroll with the eventual goal of ramping up quite a bit more over the next couple years.
It is interesting to see the roles the Navigators are expected to play for their $1000/month. In addition to just submitting tons of interesting stories, they are also supposed to help fight spamming and voting rings as well as teach new users how to use the system and provide comments to increase discussions on the various stories.
Sounds like a forum moderator job to me. With all the complaints of spam and gaming the system at Reddit and Digg, it will be interesting to see if having these kinds of moderators helps foster a better environment or just leads to people complaining that the moderators are promoting their own agenda. I’ll bet it will probably be a mix of the two.
The Netscape Navigators have been revealed.
I say good for them. Make some money having fun. I’d like to make $1000/month for dorking around on the internet.
I also say good luck to Jason Calacanis. I don’t really care if it works or not, but good luck all the same. It could change a lot of these Web2.0 grab content from everywhere and make ad money off of it pretty sites quickly if Jason’s gamble works out. It would create a fairly significant barrier to entry for new companies if they have to spend about $144,000/year just to pay some slackers to hang around their site.
And, to some extent, I bet it does work out. Bars have been using similar techniques for years. Do you think the cute girls walking around selling shots with sexy names are there just to pass their free time? They bring in some money by making the bar a little sexier and making the guys buy some more drinks. And the shot girls get money for it. The Netscape Navigators may just turn out to be the first official shot girls of Web2.0.
Get your drinks quick. Closing time might be closer than you think if Jason’s gamble backfires.
When I signed up for my Rojo account, I was automatically signed up for a feed that showed my local city news.
I have learned several things from that feed. Recently, while driving home from work, there were tons of cops on one of the main roads in the city. I learned the next day that all of the cities along the road were participating in a huge crackdown to try and slow down the traffic to prevent more accidents that have been increasing recently.
I also learned that while my daughter is not going to be able to go to public preschool because the funding isn’t there for 3 year olds with no at risk factors, a few private schools are eligible for some of that funding which might give us a better chance to get her in preschool at one of them if they increase their staffing.
I don’t ever read the newspaper or watch TV news and most online news doesn’t cover the local news very well. I’ve been addicted to this little innocent looking feed that I almost deleted when I first noticed it.
Just today I decided that I want to expand on my tightly targetted feeds to help me keep track of some niches that I’m interested in. I did a little research into how the feed was created and found that it is actually coming from Topix.net. I typed in a couple new searches and found that they somehow seem to provide some really nice information that I probably would never easily find and track any other way.
I don’t think that I ever plan on setting up a home page on their website, but I will be adding a few of their feeds to my Bloglines and Rojo accounts.
Michael Arrington of Techcrunch reported a Digg user account being sold on eBay.
Apparently even your identity and popularity can be sold on eBay these days.
A couple interesting things to note about this sale. The current bid is $325. But, the bid seems to be falsely driven up by a brand spanking new eBay Profile named onstartups who was created yesterday and so far never done anything on eBay. Not very subtle.
Somebody else has matched onstartups top bid, so the bidding war seems to be working.
Michael Arrington points out that the value of the Digg acount does have potential real monetary value both from Netscape’s offer to pay top Digg users to submit stories for Digg instead, and from the potential of using the Digg account on Digg to increase the chance of a users stories reaching the front page of Digg and landing the writer of the story extra adclick revenue.
Maybe that is the next phase. Maybe bloggers will start paying the big submitters to submit their own posts in the hope of attracting more readers and advertising revenue.
Everything online is for sale.
Reddit recently add sub domains for Slate and The New York Times. So far, Slate seems to be quite a bit more popular if the number of votes is any indication. It sounds like Reddit is trying to demonstrate to potential buyers how much they can help increase traffic. Or maybe one of the developers just thought it would be a good idea.
The question is whether the voting capability of a site like Reddit would ever have any value to a traditional media brand.
Netscape is finding out the hard way that making big changes from passive to active users does not always happen without complaints. Not everybody wants to spend time participating. A lot of people are just spending their lunch time surfing the news and expect the site they are visiting to organize it for them. There is a certain comfort that comes from repeated use of sites with strong editorial control.
A news source like Slate and The New York Times could get a nice benefit from the risk, though. In real time, and in a very direct way, they would be able to see which articles were the most popular. If analyzed properly, they could use that information to target news stories that would appeal to their readers.
That benefit comes with its own risk. Slashdot gets suggestions for articles from users and then the editors decide what belongs on the main page and what belongs on the category pages. The editors are frequently accused of supporting or being biased against certain topics. When people feel proud or slighted, it is normally the edge cases that seem to have the strongest reaction. If an article on a school board voting on discussing Intelligent Design gets a ton of response from the pro/con-ID groups, does that mean that the readers want more stories about ID, or are there a large group of readers that are bored by the story but just remain silent.
The writers would have to sort through the noise and find a way to figure out what the readers really want.
If one of the traditional media sites decides to try to give the story placement control to the readers, they would be better off offering the new Diggified version of the site AND the old editor sorted version of the site. To try and encourage voting from the old school users, they could include the vote buttons next to each story in the old layout, too.
Netscape should have gone this route with their recent change to user controlled content. There’s no reason the two kinds of filtering of data couldn’t have occurred together.
Somebody like Slate or The New York Times would be at an even greater disadvantage to switch to a voting system since they would have a much smaller story base to pull from. It’s not like The New York Times is going to want you reading editorials from other newspapers that are hosted on their competitors site. They need you focused on their own articles and ads.
Very few readers are going to get too excited about having the small number of articles a traditional print media site deals with on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis on a voting type site especially if all the articles come from one source and without allowing users to submit their own stories they find on the internet. They’ll just go to Digg or Reddit and read the best of the newspapers and magazines that make it to the top of their aggregator site.
There is a big stink going on right not because Jason Calacanis of Netscape is offering to pay top submitters at competing social networking sites.
Kent Newsome says that he thinks “the idea of paying a bunch of people to social bookmark on Netscape … is nutty” but concedes that Jason has made a lot of money doing seemingly crazy before.
The last time I visited Netscape I noticed that they monetize their site with ads. That means they are hoping to get more people to click the ads and the best way to do that is to get more eyeballs on the site.
If Jason really can attract some of those top submitters (and for $1000 a month, he will), then he will have managed to attract people to his site that know how to find articles that attract attention and probably improve the content of the site.
More importantly, he will have attracted a strong group of mentors who can help lead the newbies into the land of social bookmarking. One of the changes Netscape recently made included letting users vote on articles and having the most popular articles get the best real estate space on the home page. A lot of the current users of Netscape don’t really understand how to thrive in this kind of system which would explain the strong backlash to the changes from the existing users.
The new power users for hire might manage to excite the everyday users at Netscape and attract new eyeballs, I mean users. People online like to participate and vote for things once they realize that is what they are supposed to do. 12 of those power users will cost Netscape about $144,000 a year. Can Netscape really make $144,000 a year in ad revenue just by having 12 good submitters on their payroll?
Maybe Jason is nutty. But, Jason is looking at the bigger picture. He is not trying to beat down digg. He’s just trying to improve Netscape. Digg will continue to thrive. People will step up to fill in the spots of the people that leave for Netscape. Jason said, “It really isn’t about Netscape vs. DIGG… in reality the battle is ’social news vs. top-down news.’”
He’s just trying to position Netscape to get in a position to be one of the leaders in social news while there is still time. A couple years ago, he might look like a nutty rich man, again.
For some reason I got swept up recently with the Digg and Reddit social bookmarking sites. The lure of thousands of people digging what I have to say got the better of me and I started submitting some of my own stories. Lame.
I know that there is no money to be gained from the viewers of these sites because they normally block ads or just ignore them. Still, there’s something about trying to reach as big of an audience as possible and it is so easy to submit a story that I got carried away.
It is exciting to submit the story and then watch 30-70 people come to the site over the next 12-24 hours. How much easier could it be? And when stories take off, the traffic is insane, so I hear. If I ever do write something that gets popular over there it will be interesting to see if my Go Daddy hosted website can survive and how much bandwidth really gets used.
Fortunately, before I got too carried away, one of the Digg users called me out saying:
Last time I checked, Digg was a news site, not a “link your lame blog” site. This isn’t even general science related. It’s full of assumptions, presumptions, and opinions.
There’s a reason your blog doesn’t get traffic as it is. Thumbs down.
Of course, I was pissed at first. But after thinking it over for a couple minutes I realized he was right and just doing his best to help protect Digg. If people continuously submit their own crap instead of articles that are actually interesting, then sites like Digg and Reddit will be worthless. There’s a reason Netscape is willing to pay the good submitters $1000/month to find good content. Good content brings eyeballs. People submitting their own websites is just more spam on the internet.
I decided that I do not want to be a part of any kind of spam. So, I made a promise to myself that I will not be submitting my own stories to any of the social bookmarking sites from now on. If you write something of your own that you’d like me to read, send me a link and if I like it, I will submit your good stories to Digg or Reddit.