Broadband News

Any company that allows online users to publish comments and interact with one another via their brand will be keeping a close eye on Economist.com from the autumn onwards.

Its publisher, Ben Edwards, is in the middle of drawing up plans to take the interest and interactivity that has accompanied the Web 2.0 revolution and build it in to the company’s subscription structure. Quite how this will impact the look and the feel of the site form autumn onwards is not immediately clear but Edwards reveals he is adamant there is value in being the brand through which users communicate and that social networking does not have to be a completely free service.

“We already have a subscription model for access to the site but we’re thinking how we can take the huge amount of interest we have in our content and allow those people to communicate with one another more effectively,” he says.

“We already have something like 25,000 comments per month on our articles and so we’re working on extra functions which would allow those people to communicate with one another through us.”

User profiles

This is likely to start off in early autumn with improved ways of subscribers picking up on conversation threads and seeing who has commented on threads and articles they have contributed to.

Ultimately, however, Edwards confides in SamKnows that he wants to see the site develop to mirror social and professional networking sites.

“I think the direction we’re headed in is to set allow readers to set up profiles  so each person can put up what they’re interested in and what they do and then get in contact with other readers direct, instead of comment on articles.”

Charging an inner circle?

Hence for Edwards the way that brands can make money out of the social networking aspect of Web 2.0 is to set up a community around premium information and let people discuss it and related issues directly, via their profiles. As such, he is basically taking comments and forums and supplementing them with a LinkedIn type of service.

This may well be offered free at first, or at least part of the networking aspect may be added for free, before a pricing structure is will be added at some stage, Edwards believes.

“We’ve got to build in the value first and then see where we can take it,” he suggests.

“The honest answer is I don’t know how the readers will react but I guess our aim is to take the networking service and build an inner circle of readers who wish to interact with one another.”

It will make for an interesting case study. Broadband means people can be permanently connected to their groups of friends, colleagues and peers through networking sites but nobody has yet managed to generate considerable operational revenue from these services.

Whether the answer is to concentrate on a key ‘inner ring’ niche audience built around premium, exclusive content remains to be seen.