The Guardian: Will online content find a market?
By David Rowan
A penny for your thoughts. Or, depending on your pricing structure, 5p or £5, chargeable per minute and billable to other people's credit cards or phone bills. You're an expert, you see, and all that separates you from customers willing to pay for your specialist knowledge - on finding a reliable builder, perhaps, or overcoming baldness - is a website which allows them to find you.
Wait no longer: "expert exchange" websites are the latest hot business models heading our way. Drawing on the internet's extraordinary ability to link individuals to their peers, these "peer-to-peer" sites do for specialist knowledge what Napster does for music and eBay for car-boot junk. By restoring human guidance to the tricky business of researching information online, they have built strong traffic by finding individuals who can answer other people's questions. Yet there is one question that, even at a premium, these sites cannot yet answer with confidence: will enough people be willing to pay for web-delivered content to make a viable long-term business?
There is no shortage of sites trying to find out. AskMe.com promises "great answers from real people" in categories ranging from pets to the paranormal (currently recruiting experts in the Olympics, MP3 and Rosh Hashanah). Exp.com offers "real experts; real help" on subjects including US immigration law (advice at $1.10 a minute) and marathon running.
Search engines think there's money to be made here: Ask Jeeves was among those which put $33m into Exp.com in a recent funding round. Yahoo has also entered the market, with experts.yahoo.com, featuring such specialists as "Roumster", a 25-year-old woman keen to talk about dating problems. The New York Times has its own "knowledge network", Abuzz (top questions: what really happened to that Russian sub and whether geraniums work as house plants). KnowPost.com promises "meta-knowledge" on the Wizard of Oz and web-browsing technology.
Many of these sites rely on advertising as their business model, others customise their services for corporate customers. But it is the convergence of web and telephony that is currently exciting investors. Two phone-enabled expert exchanges are coming to London, betting on our willingness to pay by the minute to talk to specialists.
Keen.com, a San Francisco-based start-up that claims to be "the live answer community", has joined with Benchmark Capital in a $15m investment to form Keen Europe. Users will browse its subject listing, choose an expert, and then click on a "call now" button - and the site connects both parties by phone, taking a 30% commission on the call fee. Ten months after launch, parent site Keen.com claims 500,000 members, with 1.4m unique monthly visitors.
Up against Keen is Questico.com, a DM14m (£4m) German start-up founded in April that is soon to launch in the UK. The company claims to combine "the Internet's advantage of speedy information retrieval with the opportunity to instantly take part in a one-on-one dialogue over the telephone, putting an end to the long and difficult search process one often encounters". As with most of these sites, users rate the experts once they've bought the advice to ensure some measure of quality control.
These sites also benefit from the willingness of users to spend money on the telephone: premium-rate calls, after all, have been among the main money makers for companies such as the 365 Corporation, and relatively high per-minute call charges have not dented the growth of the mobile-phone sector. What is really exciting the investors is the mobile's promise to become the major means of accessing the internet in a year or two.
Keen.com's chief executive, Karl Jacob, has a vision for these information exchanges. "What eBay did for people selling what's in their garages and attics, Keen.com will do for people who want to sell what's in their heads," he says. The idea is attractive but what will determine the future of these sites is our willingness in enough numbers to abandon that tenet of web use: the public does not like paying for content.
"Every single site in the world that has tried to charge for content has rejected it - except the Wall Street Journal," notes James Ledbetter, newly arrived in London from New York as editor of the Industry Standard Europe. "The brilliance of Napster is it's free. To introduce that [peer-to-peer exchange] on a paid model is admirable, risky, but I suspect for a lot of people doing it, not ultimately successful."
I'm not so sure: for very specific information that can be delivered digitally or by phone - tips on a business plan, for instance, or professional advice on a medical problem - customers will be willing to pay a premium. And if you're still not convinced, for £1 a minute I'd be happy to tell you why.
(The Guardian, September 25, 2000)
A penny for your thoughts. Or, depending on your pricing structure, 5p or £5, chargeable per minute and billable to other people's credit cards or phone bills. You're an expert, you see, and all that separates you from customers willing to pay for your specialist knowledge - on finding a reliable builder, perhaps, or overcoming baldness - is a website which allows them to find you.
Wait no longer: "expert exchange" websites are the latest hot business models heading our way. Drawing on the internet's extraordinary ability to link individuals to their peers, these "peer-to-peer" sites do for specialist knowledge what Napster does for music and eBay for car-boot junk. By restoring human guidance to the tricky business of researching information online, they have built strong traffic by finding individuals who can answer other people's questions. Yet there is one question that, even at a premium, these sites cannot yet answer with confidence: will enough people be willing to pay for web-delivered content to make a viable long-term business?
There is no shortage of sites trying to find out. AskMe.com promises "great answers from real people" in categories ranging from pets to the paranormal (currently recruiting experts in the Olympics, MP3 and Rosh Hashanah). Exp.com offers "real experts; real help" on subjects including US immigration law (advice at $1.10 a minute) and marathon running.
Search engines think there's money to be made here: Ask Jeeves was among those which put $33m into Exp.com in a recent funding round. Yahoo has also entered the market, with experts.yahoo.com, featuring such specialists as "Roumster", a 25-year-old woman keen to talk about dating problems. The New York Times has its own "knowledge network", Abuzz (top questions: what really happened to that Russian sub and whether geraniums work as house plants). KnowPost.com promises "meta-knowledge" on the Wizard of Oz and web-browsing technology.
Many of these sites rely on advertising as their business model, others customise their services for corporate customers. But it is the convergence of web and telephony that is currently exciting investors. Two phone-enabled expert exchanges are coming to London, betting on our willingness to pay by the minute to talk to specialists.
Keen.com, a San Francisco-based start-up that claims to be "the live answer community", has joined with Benchmark Capital in a $15m investment to form Keen Europe. Users will browse its subject listing, choose an expert, and then click on a "call now" button - and the site connects both parties by phone, taking a 30% commission on the call fee. Ten months after launch, parent site Keen.com claims 500,000 members, with 1.4m unique monthly visitors.
Up against Keen is Questico.com, a DM14m (£4m) German start-up founded in April that is soon to launch in the UK. The company claims to combine "the Internet's advantage of speedy information retrieval with the opportunity to instantly take part in a one-on-one dialogue over the telephone, putting an end to the long and difficult search process one often encounters". As with most of these sites, users rate the experts once they've bought the advice to ensure some measure of quality control.
These sites also benefit from the willingness of users to spend money on the telephone: premium-rate calls, after all, have been among the main money makers for companies such as the 365 Corporation, and relatively high per-minute call charges have not dented the growth of the mobile-phone sector. What is really exciting the investors is the mobile's promise to become the major means of accessing the internet in a year or two.
Keen.com's chief executive, Karl Jacob, has a vision for these information exchanges. "What eBay did for people selling what's in their garages and attics, Keen.com will do for people who want to sell what's in their heads," he says. The idea is attractive but what will determine the future of these sites is our willingness in enough numbers to abandon that tenet of web use: the public does not like paying for content.
"Every single site in the world that has tried to charge for content has rejected it - except the Wall Street Journal," notes James Ledbetter, newly arrived in London from New York as editor of the Industry Standard Europe. "The brilliance of Napster is it's free. To introduce that [peer-to-peer exchange] on a paid model is admirable, risky, but I suspect for a lot of people doing it, not ultimately successful."
I'm not so sure: for very specific information that can be delivered digitally or by phone - tips on a business plan, for instance, or professional advice on a medical problem - customers will be willing to pay a premium. And if you're still not convinced, for £1 a minute I'd be happy to tell you why.
(The Guardian, September 25, 2000)
posted by David Rowan at Monday, September 25, 2000
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