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Levy Rivers

Users Demand Expertise at How-To Web Sites - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...28ecom.html

& barnes crowd expertise howto noble of project wisdom

shared by Levy Rivers on 14 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Quamut is the latest brand to capitalize on what company executives said is a growing disinclination among Web users for amateur how-to advice. Whether that distaste can support a departure from Barnes & Noble’s core business is a question investors will be considering.
  • Quamut differentiates itself from the long list of how-to sites like eHow, HowStuffWorks.com and, to a lesser degree, About.com (which is owned by The New York Times Company), with a somewhat novel twist: selling downloadable documents of its otherwise free conten
  • This is far from the first online publishing initiative for Barnes & Noble, Mr. Weiss said. Among other efforts, the company in 2001 bought SparkNotes, an online study guide series, and helped oversee the expansion of that business into a wide range of topics. It also began printing and selling the guides in its stores
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  • Quamut pays a team of freelance writers to create those, which are vetted by the company’s editors. Those writers, Mr. Weiss said, are the other important difference between Quamut and sites that rely on self-proclaimed experts or site visitors for content. “We actually don’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd,” he said. “This is the old-fashioned publishing model.”
  • That model has established About.com as one of the most popular sites on the Web, and helped prop up the Times Company’s revenue. About, which offers a combination of how-to content and less pedagogical information involving urban legends or political humor, pays 721 freelancers to cover some 70,000 topics. Roughly 41 million people visited the site last month, according to comScore Networks, an increase of about 3 million from December.
  • Mr. Sinha, of the JMP Group, said the most successful how-to sites are likely to include expert advice, as well as advice from other readers and a format that allows questions and answers.
  • That is closer to the approach taken by Demand Media’s eHow, which is among the oldest of how-to sites. Investors poured about $30 million into the site during the online boom, only to see the business falter when advertising revenue dried up. After Demand bought eHow two years ago, it continued to build the site’s content with professionally written articles, but also allowed users to chime in with their own advice.
  • Levy Rivers on 14 Sep 08
     
    Division of B & N is trying to move into active space
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