Enhancing online user-comments on news sites: Market analysis
Derick Stace-Naughton (MBA)Nick TroccoliRuth BramThomas Johnson
April 29, 2014
Commentopic
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Target users attributes
• Engaged, frequent consumers of news
• Tech-savvy Internet users
• Share opinions on Twitter
• Want to be part of a meaningful conversation
Target product
• Multi-platform plug-in designed for popular news sites
• Creates new, more sophisticated comments sections
• Identifies topics most relevant to article
• Identifies tweets referencing that article and/or topic
• Populates enriched comment section with topic-level commentary
Objective: enhance and enrich user comments on news sites
In-progress user testing will validate product concept
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Example: Different publications on Stanford entrepreneurs
Traditional comments Traditional commentsTraditional comments
Single forum on the subject of Stanford entrepreneurs
• Combines commentary initiated by variety of publications• Facilitates topic-level (rather than article-specific)
discussion• Populated primarily by Twitter comments
Twitter comments referencing article
Twitter comments referencing article
Twitter comments referencing article
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Revenue scenarios
Charge news organization an annual subscription for enriched comments, enabled for all the org’s online content
Offer news organizations enriched comments service for free, charge advertisers
Charge news organizations subscription feeds and generate ad revenue
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Business model and revenue generation
Model: We are a B2B service provider, delivering an ‘enriched comments’ service to online news orgs
Value proposition: Improve comment section quality by sourcing high-quality, Twitter-based engagement
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Potential customers and/or partners
Reuters
Customers: Our customers are large news organizations with robust online content distribution
TechCrunch
Forbes
CNN
NYT
TBD (insert relevant info on technical parameters of potential partners)
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Challenges and risks
• Interviews with potential users yield mixed results• Majority of interviewees do NOT look to currently comments section
as a source of meaningful content or engagement• Mixed preferences for Twitter-based comments section vs. traditional
comments• Only relatively small portion of interviewees seek engagement with
news content• Widespread adoption could require a substantive re-branding of news
comments sections
• Many online news organizations already operating at a lose or with compressed margins
• Would likely have to validate ‘enriched comments’ as a traffic driver in order to justify subscription fee
Hesitant users
Resource-constrained customers
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