A Misfire in the Dark: How Not to Do Online Media

There's been some hype lately for wowowow.com, a founder-funded web site for "accomplished women over 40" that launched last weekend (press release here). Last week it was featured by the New York Times, PaidContent.org, and Mashable, among others; it was on Good Morning America today. Notably, the founders are all women in media. But unfortunately for the many people who think wowowow is a promising concept and would like to see it succeed, the founders are all from traditional media, and the old-fashioned business assumptions they bring from that environment result in a "me-too" web site that misses many opportunities for thought leadership and innovation.

Wowowow is what happens when traditional media thinking intersects the online medium without much thought to the dramatically different business environments the two platforms present. And by the way, I don't mean to pick on wowowow specifically. It's typical of many middling web businesses these days, and for that reason presents a good object lesson in how not to build a media web site in 2008.

In traditional media, because of high unit costs for production and distribution, it makes sense to start with a narrowly targeted, high-value concept--such as serving the information needs of affluent older women. Your brand identity is tightly connected with a restrictive definition of audience. You don't want to waste resources creating products consumed by people your advertisers don't want to reach. With traditional media, the advertising opportunity is the starting point for the business concept.

Online is the opposite; it's all about scale. While the low barrier to entry online makes it easy to create niche sites such as wowowow, the greatest rewards are reserved for those who tap into the web's extraordinary scale opportunities. So online media is about inclusivity and the starting point is the audience. The key to delivering value is the ability to segment that audience for advertisers who want to reach niches--self-segmentation through content affinity, inferred segmentation through behavioral targeting, demographic segmentation based on profile data...whatever.

The economics of online favor scale and online technology facilitates segmentation. Therefore the web also favors diversity, a larger pool from which to segment. Demographically monotonous sites such as wowowow come up short.

Interactivity also differentiates the online medium from its traditional ancestor. People who prefer to receive content in a passive way gravitate toward the one-way, top-down mode of traditional presentation. Those who consume content online see themselves as co-creators of the site experience and expect a conversation. While wowowow allows comments on the articles it presents, it doesn't give the audience a full seat at the table when it comes to generating content and connecting with one another. Related, the web is about democracy. You create content, I create content; we share opinions and debate basically as equals. Instead of any of this wowowow has an old-school, nose-against-the-glass feel as the audience mainly observes the antics of the celebrity founders and their pals.

Traditional media is also segmented by medium: video is on TV, audio is on radio, print is in newspapers and magazines, and the various media rarely intersect. Wowowow honors this tradition by being text-centric, rather like a web site from the last century. But fast-forward to 2008 and you'll notice that the best sites are all polyphonic, telling their stories with a mix of audio, video, text, slides, interactive graphics, and more. Check out CNN's forward-thinking design, for example, where content on a variety of platforms, by both paid staff and citizen journalists, coexists on the home page. The goal is to tell the story through the medium the audience will find most appropriate and compelling for that message.

Finally, the web is also about technology. This manifests itself in many ways, from the how the site functions to content about the tech-driven gadgets we all use. Wowowow seems almost devoid of technology; I looked in vain for a bit of AJAX and couldn't even find an RSS feed. Paradoxically, the founders seem to believe their online audience are stuck in the age of rotary phones, film cameras, 45 rpm records, and ViewMasters. You have to believe, if your audience is online, that they have some interest in technology and appreciate good web design. Show them some respect with a technically competent site that invokes the wow factor.

The web is all about innovation, and innovation is all about overcoming fear of failure and embracing risk. Sites like wowowow seem a bit timid to let go of business ideas that succeeded back in the day of traditional media. Concepts about demographic targeting or content subject matter alone aren't sufficient to drive online innovation. You have to insert these into a bigger picture vision of the medium and its future.