So Friends Reunited is in a fire sale for a fraction of the reported £170,000,000 it was “worth” 5 years ago when ITV bought it. This teaches us a couple of lessons that to be honest have been learnt a million times over. Social media sites are very prone to the shifting tides of fashion and it’s hella hard to make money from them (Twitter’s got about a year to figure that out by my finger-in-the-air calculation).
The dipshits running the show at Friends Reunited were lauded during their brief spot in the sunshine when they sold out and made their fortune. They’d taken a basic human impulse -curiousity – and found an angle to tap into: “I wonder if Carps is really as rich and successful as we suspected he would be when we were at school?”* Just register with your name, school and years you attended and you could bring people up to speed with what you were up to. But they overlooked some pretty basic flaws in what they were doing.
Firstly, by initially marketing at the idea of old school friends it kind of built in a short lifecycle for membership. Once you’d found out that the kids you bullied at school were now far richer and leading more interesting lives than you what was there left to know? But, there might be the odd person you’d fancy contacting for more of a chat so you could email them… and…
…Whoops! The single flaw that killed Friends Reunited more than anything else was the idea of charging a fiver to be able to send emails. Just think about that. A fiver. To send emails. To people you haven’t maybe spoken to in 2 decades and didn’t make much of an effort to get in touch with in the intervening years. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out where that was going to end up. It spawned a silly arms race where people would try to publish their email address in the form of a crossword puzzle:
“My email is carpsio hat (without the ‘h’) live, another word for ‘spot’ com. Got it?
”
Sigh.
Eventually, they dropped that whole thing but by that point MySpace and then Facebook had taken the central conceit, made it free and open-ended and were letting people customise their profiles, throw sheep at each other, encourage each other to commit suicide and very probably embark on a series of ill-starred love affairs.
The other big lesson sitting in the background is that traditional media concerns shouldn’t really try to buy online properties they don’t understand. Did the whole AOL/Warner Brothers thing totally bypass the kind of guys who flounce about Canary Wharf? Apparently so. For where they led, ITV followed and Rupert Murdoch stumbled after and you just know that someone somewhere is thinking of raiding the piggy bank to buy Twitter or Facebook. At which point they will die and we can meet up again and laugh about it.
*no
lol nice post Man