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