Success with an S!

"The audience is not a something, a pre-existing entity out there in the social landscape waiting to be enticed, seduced and explained. It is something to be built, dynamically negotiated and coordinated" (Banks, 2002, 191).

The Fan Forum server was down all over Easter and it finally came back up a couple of days ago. I didn't realise how much I had missed it! Oh jeez, I think I'm hooked. So instead I started next week's reading early.

Community development websites are starting to appear all over the internet. Just like this one. Guaranteed strategies for accumulating users and getting attention are hard to come by; most of the information you find is useful, but its exceptionally hard to target and maintain a regular, online audience seeing as there is a significant number of online companies that fail.

I come from a marketing background, and I do have to say I somewhat disagree with the above quote. Yes, community audiences do have to be built, but an audience is a pre-existing entity waiting to be enticed and seduced. Benton strongly emphasizes that members need a reason to keep coming back to your community. In saying that, members aren't going to go to your community at all if you don't satisfy a member's want or need. Members are going to go looking for places online where they can satisfy that want or need, not wait for someone to come to them.

Being able to keep the site running is harder. How would you go about funding? Although with our online community (we are calling it Fairfux, to publish the real news of Australia) I was just going to say advertisers would fund our website. But then I got thinking because John Banks mentioned users could ignore banner ads. So maybe advertising can't account for most of our costs? What's left then? Subscription fees? Selling T-shirts? Nah ... online advertising wouldn't be so huge if it didn't work!

If you had a really good online community, like Crikey! you could still keep advertisers, but rely on word-of-mouth to advertise your site. That way you would get a significant amount of traffic, maybe charge an annual fee, and you'll be set to pay your bills!