Crispynews, a site which I’ve wrote about earlier, is closing its doors to personal users.
Crispynews enabled users to create their own mini-community with a Digg-like voting system, and it even had AdSense a revenue sharing program with its users. However, they will now be directing their efforts towards enterprise customers. Unfortunately for their previous users, this is the end of the road for them - although I reckon it’s possible to reach a deal with CrispyIdeas to maintain your site for a fee. Here’s an excerpt from the mail they’ve sent to their current users:
“We’ve decided to shift our business to enterprise customers and the CrispyIdeas product. To focus our energies, we need to close down many of our ad-supported communities.”
These things happen, and I wish all the best to CrispyIdeas, however it’s another reminder that if you’re going to put some effort in your online project(s) you should be hosting them yourself.
I’m not sure why they did this, but my guess is this: CrispyNews 1.0 (the social community) was one of those bad ideas that seemed like a great idea at first glance.
As most people who have ever built their own Digg-clone (on a micro scale of course) know: without visitors, you’ve essentially created nothing more a page of links. Furthermore, the strength of a social-news site rests almost entirely with its active users. CrispyNews was serving hundreds (I don’t even think they hit thousands, but I’m not sure about that) of ‘link pages’ which garnered very little traffic, and of course very little revenue. Who needs another aggregator when there already so many better ones?
I think the lesson here is that in Web 1.0 we all believed that the functionality is what made a site great. In 2.0 we’re consistently reminded that community is the key. …And a community of “authors” (I use the term broadly because Digg style aggregators aren’t really authors) with no visitors is relatively worthless.
By providing commercial solutions, CrispyNews is shifting from a community-focus (because they never had a community to begin with) to a service focus which taps into deep existing communities.
IMHO they made the right call.
@Roven: you’re probably right. However, if we’re to look for reasons why CrispyNews didn’t work all that well in the first place, one of them was surely pretty bad design of the site. I guess they figured they’re better at technology than at design so they focused on what they’re doing well.
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