More Web 2.0 is Better… Sometimes

By Ian, on September 20th, 2006

What’s the business case for Web 2.0 technologies? Well, it depends on your business. For newspaper publishers, the answer appears to be that more is better. You may recall from an earlier post that the Guardian newspaper website tops the league in the UK for Web 2.0 features (research conducted by Robin Hamman. click for bigger):

In an interview with E-Consultancy, Simon Waldman, director of digital strategy at GMG and former head of the site, was asked about the commercial impact of these features:

Itâ€™s quite difficult to rate any one of those things, and their current value. Thereâ€™s an overall message that as an organisation we are committed to innovation and development and we are relatively rapid at turning things around.
Our core economic value is in generating advertising revenue, but there is so much happening structurally around the way that content is created and put together at the moment that you need to introduce these elements at the first opportunity on to your site so you can learn how they might be of value.
It also depends what youâ€™re talking about. RSS doesnâ€™t impact us economically, either way. Blogging has also been a fantastic way to grow traffic and build communities. Whatâ€™s important is their combined power, so that people know we are the smartest newspaper on the web. Thatâ€™s what we win awards for and thatâ€™s how people see us.

There are several aspects to this answer that I’ll briefly unpick:

1) When you make several changes all at the same time, it becomes very hard to know what value (or damage) is being done by individual features.

2) At the same time, it is the combination of technologies, rather than individual widgets, that contains the power. Blogs aren’t nearly as good without RSS, comments, and trackbacks, for example.

3) For a newspaper, or almost any information agency, being seen to be on top of the latest technology is a good thing in itself. The Guardian wants to be recognised as a ‘smart’ paper. To some extent, investing in new technologies has been an end unto itself.

The Guardian has taken a ‘stick it on and see what happens’ approach which has worked pretty well for them. It’s a much more powerful newspaper online than it is in print, with weaker offline circulations than the three lesser online competitors shown here:

newspapersites

However, the model could not really be applied to other businesses. If what you do is sell flowers online, for example, then your priority is probably to try to make it easier to find the flowers you want and easier to buy them. There’s some evidence that AJAX will increase sales by streamlining the process: eliminating page loads and the number of clicks required to do what you want to do. But in this business, there needs to be such a rationale for any new feature. They certainly shouldn’t just try things and see what happens. Will tagging increase usability or just get in the way? Is a weekly podcast/social network/flash video about new flowers of any merit whatsoever? It’s stating the obvious, but for most businesses, new technologies are not an end unto themselves in the way they have been for the Guardian.