Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Quarterlife.com in freefall
A year ago I started consulting for Quarterlife.com, and helped with the initial sourcing of talent and getting the project off the ground. I haven’t kept track of the site since I started teaching, but did wonder what its fate would be after the television series went the way of the dodo.
In the month of June, the site’s reach dropped from .006 to .001. Admittedly, the most drastic part of the plummet is with reach and rank, but clearly it’s not a healthy social network site. I’m not sure why the drop - it’s too late for it to be due to college students leaving for the summer - but certainly new users aren’t coming to the site like they once were. There’s nothing that says “crash” more than Google adsense advertisements for incontinence showing up on a site’s main page. People notice when you’re selling out the most prominent area on the site for a low CPM rate. It screams desperation.
The whole Quarterlife story is tragic, because if it were successful, it might have ushered in new opportunities for those in the entertainment industry. Chalk it up to short-lived buzz not lending itself to a long-term business. The idea was to get the buzz around the show to feed into a social network, but the may just not be enough opportunities on the site to fill in the gaps between the peaks in popularity. Although promised, the contests have yet to appear. To my mind, this would be the “killer app” of Quarterlife, which would retain users with other activities, similar to OurStage.
In the month of June, the site’s reach dropped from .006 to .001. Admittedly, the most drastic part of the plummet is with reach and rank, but clearly it’s not a healthy social network site. I’m not sure why the drop - it’s too late for it to be due to college students leaving for the summer - but certainly new users aren’t coming to the site like they once were. There’s nothing that says “crash” more than Google adsense advertisements for incontinence showing up on a site’s main page. People notice when you’re selling out the most prominent area on the site for a low CPM rate. It screams desperation.
The whole Quarterlife story is tragic, because if it were successful, it might have ushered in new opportunities for those in the entertainment industry. Chalk it up to short-lived buzz not lending itself to a long-term business. The idea was to get the buzz around the show to feed into a social network, but the may just not be enough opportunities on the site to fill in the gaps between the peaks in popularity. Although promised, the contests have yet to appear. To my mind, this would be the “killer app” of Quarterlife, which would retain users with other activities, similar to OurStage.
Labels: facebook, MySpace, quarterlife, quarterlife.com, SNS, social networking
