I feel badly for Gather. What started out as good publicity in its hometown newspaper ended up in blue ruin as bloggers roundly pommelled the blog aggregation service for its poor business plan and awkward approach to the market.
Is Gather just one more would-be Web 2.0 company that's been thrown under the blogosphere bus?
Perhaps. Gather is a kind of blog aggregation service: It hosts your writing, sells ads around your content, and then gives you a share of that revenue. It wraps that value proposition in the metaphor of promoting community and appeals to any disconsolate authors whose egos have been humbled by the "Literary Industrial Complex."
Personally, I'm not enticed. But as I survey the other players in this crowded space of content aggregation, I can understand how some people might be.
Who are the other players? There are many. You could cast a wide net and say that Gather competes against the likes of About.com, digg and reddit.
But I think it's more informative to focus on "long-form" UGC (user-generated content) sites. The first that comes to mind is Newsvine, a news-and-blog aggregator that is in private beta right now. Newsvine also solicits user-generated content. Like Gather, Newsvine offers a model for sharing ad revenue. But unlike Gather, Newsvine publishes news feeds from The Associated Press and ESPN, and it offers several other features, including live chat.
Bayosphere, Backfence, and Squidoo share aspects of the Gather value proposition, but each has its own unique scope and strategy. Both Bayosphere and Backfence are localized services for specific geographic areas. Neither tempts users with revenue sharing. Both promote community.
Sites that employ UGC offer several options
Squidoo doesn't expressly promote community, although that is a side effect of the service. Rather, Squidoo is designed to develop and promote expert opinion. Squidoo also offers revenue sharing. (See Figure 1 for a graph of these services' options.)
Each of these sites offers different prisms, or metaphors, through which the user can experience the service. Newsvine's metaphor could be called organic journalism. Bayosphere and Backfence's metaphor is local community. Squidoo's metaphor is expertise. Certainly there are overlapping components of these sites, but the way they present those components is of utmost importance to their target demographic.
Consider for a moment MySpace.com, a social networking site that's not in Gather's market space. The only possible reason I can think of for that ugly, unreliable, ad-laden site to have succeeded is that the founders intuitively understood that young people wanted an online playpen to call their own. Their own space. Very few rules. Call it the "dirty basement" metaphor. It's beyond the brand.
In that same vein, Gather's metaphor is empowerment. The site may say it wants to promote community, and community may be a side effect of the service (I doubt it), but the real draw is empowering unpublished writers who don't know they're already empowered.
So instead of looking at Gather through the prism of Web 2.0, we should consider it the quintessential "red state" service. It's not hip. It's not pretty. It doesn't wear black or sport horn-rimmed glasses or know who JCR Licklider is. But it will let you write anything and pay you for doing it. It's no wonder Gather CEO Tom Gerace says the site is like eBay for writers. Everybody knows what eBay is, and everybody knows you can make money on it.
While that may not mean much to any of us, with our TypePad accounts, RSS feed aggregators and del.icio.us bookmarks, it could mean a lot to late adopters. I think Jason Calcanis unwittingly proved that point with his seering post against Gather. Jason's ΓΌ ber-smart, but I think he forgets (as do we all sometimes) that there are millions upon millions of people out there who aren't quite as hip to this marketplace. That will only work in Gather's favor.
Now with all this said, the criticism is largely correct: Gather is atrocious. Its uninspired design coupled with its taxonomic hierarchy and dedicated ad-sales strategy smacks of a ponzi scheme rather than a community portal. Gather looks like the Internet equivalent of those ad cards I see stuck to the windows on the subway: "Make thousands of $$$ working from home part-time!!!"
Perhaps even more importantly, the pundits in this space don't trust Gather's founders. This could be very important. Newsvine was created by Mike Davidson, a well-known developer. Bayosphere was created by tech journalist Dan Gillmor. Backfence (which, it should be noted, is having problems of its own) was created by two former Washington Post staffers. These guys have enormous street cred, and people trust them.
And of course those in the know, like Jason, realize that Gather's revenue-sharing proposition is an inneficient reiteration of the same proposition offered by Google to independent bloggers.
All these facts work against Gather.
So why is ad revenue sharing so hot right now? Revenue sharing is the logical extension of two trends: the growth of online advertising and the growth of business plans that require a critical mass of UGC. At its best, revenue sharing can be a good way to get folks interested. At its worst, it's the equivalent of "forum builder" services in which a company pays another company to artificially invent conversation. But, such plans don't require any capital outlay. It's an easy carrot to offer. And thus, it's probably a very attractive strategy to investors.
Unfortunately, what was once a differentiator may become all too common. I wonder if the ad marketplace will support the growth of such a phenomenon. I'm all for making easy money, but I certainly don't want to feel like a wage slave every time I post to a forum. And I don't want to feel like revenue shares are my main economic incentive for being online.
When money becomes the main incentive for community on the Web, we all lose.
