“News 2.0″ sites are launching faster than I can keep up. Gather is the most recent.
Gather is a social news site that allows user to submit content and generate a revenue share based on activity on the site. They boast $7m in venture funding over two rounds.
So that’s the good news.
I usually don’t post about companies I don’t like unless I can be constructive. I am going to point out some weaknesses in Gather.com. These are only my opinion, but I think there are some serious flaws here.
First, the site is poorly designed, very cluttered and doesn’t clearly state what they are doing.
Second, Newsvine (early post on them), which is still in private beta, has shown the power of combining news items with user comments. It’s an obvious way to combine edge content with user interaction and prove the value of being a middleman. Gather doesn’t do this.
Third, the revenue sharing won’t work. Steve Rubel says why – the market is saturated (although unlike Steve I applaud them for at least trying to get advertisers directly and fighting Google’s ridiculously undisclosed revenue share percentage). My main issue is that I don’t think this will provide enough of an incentive to get users attention.
Fourth, Gather encourages tagging of news items and yet has a rigid directory taxonomy (meaning at the end of the day that they do not trust tags to create their directory). Bad idea. Go with the tags, drop the taxonomy and see what develops.
Bloggers are generally giving Gather a big thumbs down. Mathew Ingram does a particularly good job in talking about all the competitors. He left out the massively funded Inform.com though, another service that has struggled with product direction but that is clearly taking criticisms constructively.
Gather surely looks cluttered and confusing (which is very web 1.0)… However, keeping in mind they have secured funding for their venture, it would be interesting to watch how fast they grow their database of advertisers. Even though it would have been more sensible to go the Google way as far as advertising is concerned, they can work their way up if things are made much more simpler rather than complex…
Mustafa, I’m with you.
i agree with your first three points, but i don’t think an old school navigation directory should be a reason for a thumbs-down. rigid directories seem out of fashion these days, but using user tagging alone does have a couple of disadvantages. let’s keep in mind most people out there are still pretty user1.0.
It’s funny. I just Gather, myself. I think you articulated some of the confusion I had, though in my piece, I walked over that and straight into comparing it to other social-aggregator sites. Thanks for your thoughts on Gather, as it extends the conversation. I’ll link to your trackback.
“They boast $7m in venture funding over two rounds.”
“Gather, which boasts $6 million in funding”
Looks like we’ve got a little contradiction over here ..
When I heard about it, I thought it would be great to have a site that truly “gathered” all the blogs together, which is what I understood it’s purpose to be. But to think that we’re all going to jump ship from our current blogging platforms to post on Gather is ridiculous…or that we’re happy to double-post – once to Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, MT, EE – and then again to Gather…crazy.
My biggest problem is that the interface is very cluttered, you don’t know where to look first. Then, I looked to the X to close the tab.
I agree wholeheartedly with the previously mentioned sentiments. I think the site is entirely too busy, and the advertising is far to obstrusive. I understand that sites cannot run on passion alone, but if you’re going to be utilizing advertising to help fund your project, it should be done in a way that doesn’t interfere with your users ability to navigate your site effectively.
I believe that one of the founders of Gather commented somewhere (could it be Micro Persuasion?) saying that they collected a few million more in VC funding in total.
I especially loved the Boston Globe article that was written about them, where the author claimed that they’re one of the first companies to let writers get paid for their online writing. Hilarious!
Man that page is so cluttered I don’t even know where to look. Some good information design tutorials might go a long way. Or they could just hire Jakob Nielsen since they have enough capital to pay his fees
Its amazing that they “gathered” several million in funding. Do they have some incredible trick up their sleeve?
I’d agree that they should hire Nielsen, but also include an entire Use Case methodology team to nail down the site’s core functionality.
They have 6m in funding. They have 23 ppl working on this. Their website sucks. They don’t let authors have their own ads on their own content.
The VC world is just an unfair place because some people seem to have exclusive rights on VCs money, most of which is wasted.
“I usually don’t post about companies I don’t like unless there is a constructive reason for doing so.”
Apart from the tortuous use of language, this reads like someone who has the arrogance of thinking that affection for something should be the prime criteria for selection. As we’d say in Europe…Juvenile bollox.
I don’t really understand the 23 people and $7M in funding either. Unless 18 of those folks are dedicated to direct ad sales, this sort of business just doesn’t justify this overhead IMHO.
But I guess I’ll break from the crowd and say that I think it’s a neat concept. I don’t see it as just another blogging platform. The focus is more on the article than the blog – which makes it more collaborative. As a reader you might go to Gather to check out recent articles from a number of your favorite authors – a subtle difference from going to a blog to check out recent posts from a blogger. Not quite a wiki, but closer.
And as far as the revenue sharing – say what you want, but these guys are still ahead of the curve. How many Web 2.0 sites are giving back to their contributors? And unlike the blog networks, Gather’s writers are not handpicked superstar bloggers – they’re anybody.
I think it’s only a matter of time before ALL sites that rely on user-generated content will have to share the profits.
Ho Hum – another social blogging/tagging/networking site. I do not believe the overall market is saturated – rather that not enough people have entered the realm of interest to make any more of these sites worthwhile [at this time]. Besides – as Amazon.coma and its ilk have clearly demonstrated – in the digital world there are no ‘Max Occupancy’ rules.
Err – Dennis H., I think you’ve missed the point of blogging. Seeing as this is Michaels personal web2.0 blog, his affection for something is really the *only* criteria for selection. As we say here in North America, trolling blog comments is “Juvenile Bollocks.”
I definitely agree Lawrence, what could possibly warrant that large of a staff where the entire site is made up of *user-generated content*.
News Bump is one of the best of these types of sites that I’ve seen. It has a much cleaner interface than Gather, NewVine etc.
http://www.tech...athercom-issue/
Hey Michael- Thanks for the constructive criticism. We take these thoughts seriously. The team at Gather knows we have a lot of work to do on the service (and we are hard at work doing just that).
That said, just two months into our public beta, our community has grown past 10,000 people and is doubling every month. Gather members are engaged, publishing, commenting, and connecting at an increasing rate. Something is working well on Gather.com, all the challenges aside.
A couple of specific thoughts:
1) We agree on the interface: We are working on ways to simplify it for our new users and make it more customizable for regular users.
2) Tags v. taxonomy: We wanted to try both methods of organization because our members skew older than the MySpace crowd. We wanted to see how they reacted if we offered a choice. We have finished that evaluation Tags win even for this audience. More to come on that front with our next release.
3) On revenue share: I respectfully disagree. Advertising revenue in the space is climbing quickly. Demand for ad space is outstripping supply. This is shown most powerfully by climbing CPC’s.
We simply believe that we can take a share of the billions that will be spent on online advertising for individual publishers, helping them to monetize their content online.
My prior company, Be Free, had great success capturing a share of advertising revenue and sharing it with “the long tail” as well. Be Free was one of the largest “affiliate” or “pay-for-performance” marketing companies in the late 1990’s. (Be Free went public in 1999, completed a secondary in 2000, and was sold to ValueClick NASDAQ:VCLK in a 50-50 merger in 2002. It remains a profitable part of the ValueClick family). By aggregating many, many smaller publishers, we created a very compelling sales channel for advertisers.
This is a different model, to be sure. We are excited, however, to see numbers even in this very early stage that are trending as we expected them to. On this front, I suppose, nothing succeeds like success. Our first few writers that start making real cash on Gather will be the proof point.
To clarify one question raised above in comments: Gather has raised a total of $9M to date, $3M in December 2004 and $6M with our round announced this month. The oft-cited $7M figure quotes articles showing that one of our investors (American Public Media Group, a public radio organization) invested $1M in the company and adds that to our just announced investment round. That $1M was part of the $3M invested in December, 2004.
I would love to talk more about your thoughts anytime and look forward to showing you an improved Gather in less than a month.
I think there is a huge part of the equation here that people are missing: the public radio devoted audience. American Public Media Group (Minnesota Public Radio with a newer fancy name) which started gather.com, has a devoted following of 7 million listeners. (AMPG will use the money raised in this for profit venture to feed public radio content–it’s a nice little revenue circle that’s completely legal.) That’s why they are getting funding — this audience means huge dollars for investors.
Yes it looks like Myspace (since a good number of the people working at gather did work at myspace) but Myspace caters to a completely different crowd then the over-educated, higher earning, well-informed public radio listening audience: in other words, people who can command higher ad dollars.
I wouldn’t judge Gather.com’s success yet just based on what everyone is calling poor design — it’s in Beta testing right now, anyway, and design can change. What I would watch is the number of ads popping up all over public radio, especially as “underwriters” of popular shows like Marketplace.
My belief is that we have yet to see the wild card of this Web site. If on-air personalities like Garrison Keillor start telling everone that he “gathers”, who knows the strange effect this will have on the marketplace. Combine that with getting out the message that when you support gather.com, you are supporting public programming, you are going to see a lot of loyalists (the same ones who write their annual checks to public radio) making sure that if they do post a blog, that a copy of it gets onto Gather.com.
In all over the world, a country’s economy develops from behindhand to developed is all a process of urbanization. The significant indicator is that the proportion of urban population is increasing among the total population. Take the British for instance. Its urbanization level is reached 90%. Yusof, an expert of the World Bank, believes that since the 1980s nearly10% of China’s economic growth gains from the process of urbanization. Looking to the future, China can achieve at least the same contributive rate of urbanization to economic growth. The income of farmers is too low, but the house prices are too high, so is it possible to increase the income of farmers so that the farmers can afford houses in cities? This is the absolutely impossible. So the Chinese urbanization is not a real reason for the substantial increasing of house price but the impetus of dropping.
For the moment in China, the economic benefit of real estate is extremely considerable. However, this kind of high income is not sustainable. The essence of this kind of income relies on its nature of being essential commodities to carry on the monopoly in order to gain the excess profit. Approximately there are reasons of this excess profit. One is the “city charm”that causes the monopoly of realty industry, and the other is tied judgment to values that causes the monopoly. A wrong understanding about real estate is that the view of real estate products are essential commodities is dissimilated to the view that real estate products of one region are essential commodities. Furthermore, there are two necessary conditions for the real estate products of one region to become the essential commodities. The first is that the population condition can meet the long-term maintenance or even can grow stably. Furthermore, the overall income level can grow unceasingly and also the growth of income is over the growth of the price of real estate products. However, these two necessary conditions can not be met. After all, the stably increasing population and the stably increasing product’s price can not be realized. That is to say using high real estate price to maintain is impossible and the real estate is the mainstay of the economy is meaningless and lack practical support.