Juicy Campus and Gossip
JuicyCampus.com was based on one of the less desirable habits we as humans have: gossip. Gossip sells as any visit to a supermarket checkout will show you. However this web site took gossip to a new level allowing college students to post anonymously about their student life, other students and faculty. They were able to hide behind the Communications Decency Act of 1996 which ensured they were not liable for third party comments and postings. This approach resulted in an expose in the crime section of CNN online.
Further a Colgate University student was arrested and charged with second-degree aggravated harassment after he threatened a shooting as a prank on JuicyCampus.com, according to published reports. Then New Jersey investigated JuicyCampus.com for a possible violation of the state’s Consumer Fraud Act and in Nov 2008, Tennessee State University became the first state funded university to ban the web site.
Juicy Campus as a business
JuicyCampus.com was dependent on online ad revenue. The official reason for closure was that “JuicyCampus’ growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive the economic downturn and the current level of revenue generated is simply not sufficient to keep the site alive.” Their official blog goes on to say “Online ad spend dropped across the board as the economy took a turn for the worse.”
So now JuicyCampus.com has closed it’s doors with 20 people it employed moving on. Their web site now redirects to a new web site which describes its mission: “The CollegeACB or College Anonymous Confession Board seeks to give students a place to vent, rant, and talk to college peers in an environment free from social constraints and about subjects that might otherwise be taboo.”
And with this auspicious declaration, campus gossip lives on online. The new website seems to be looking to minimize ads and generate income through an ecommerce store and Paypal donations. So what can we learn from this?
Online ad revenue trend
It makes sense that online ad revenue in some sectors may fall as advertisers decrease their ad spend and become more choosy about where to spend. However online ad cost is relatively cheap compared to other media and advertisers can often better focus on their target audience online. So whether online ad revenue will fall or not will very much depend on the topic you are invested in and what audience you attract. For domainers, this is all dictated by the domain name and though type-in traffic can be highly targeted, without development not much can be done to adjust to the new economic conditions.
Diversify your revenue streams
A business model completely dependent on online ad revenue means that it’s success or failure is tied to ad spend. Much like stocks, diversification is smart in tough times. Domainers certainly have the ability to look to sell domains to generate revenue but the model is rather narrow and undiversified.
The recent buzz about development is an increasing awareness that this business model can be vulnerable to harsh economic times. While development is not a cure all, it allows the owner to test other revenue streams such as affiliates or ecommerce and new traffic sources such as search engines.
Become versatile and robust
Diversified revenue streams give a business much more versatility and robustness to help it weather tough times. Now is certainly a good time to look into how to diversify your business and revenue. Development is not always the solution and for those unfamiliar with the process and outsourcing the work, they may find themselves quickly out of their depth.
Domainers are often used to passive income from parked pages whereas development of domains often requires considerable maintenance, tweaking, promotion and readjustments as necessary. Link building, search engine optimization (SEO), customer relations, ad positioning and more need constant attention in most cases. The choice then is to either develop some or all the skills necessary or to outsource these efforts. Even outsourcing requires that you understand enough about the process to be able to monitor and grade the work done for you.
Time to check your business model
So have a look at what is working for you and what is not. Think about what other revenue streams might be available to you. I certainly find it useful to categorize my domains or web sites by topic and explore what others are doing in that sector to attract traffic and generate revenue. Perhaps diversification is right for you and this may be just what you need to get through these tough financial times.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My suspicion is that this web site closed because of mounting legal cases. Whether unfounded or not the sheer volume made the cost of defense prohibitive.
Another possibility is that universities were threatening to pull the plug on their entire online ad spend because they were fed up of having ads for their unis autogenerated next to posts about the size of their professors’ breasts.
The business model’s real flaw is that it is a forum for slander, which is illegal, and the fact that creating such a forum is not illegal is very thin ice.
Phil
All certainly possible. The heat may have been too much after a while.
I just thought it might be a good reminder to everyone to look carefully at their plans, business model and revenue streams.