Video: Online Community Panel Discussion

By Richard Rabbat

Here’s a video of a recent panel discussion.

The MIT Club of Northern California hosted a panel on Oct 4, moderated by Safa Rashtchy, managing partner at Piper Jaffray. The panelists were Brad Horowitz, VP of Product Strategy/Advanced Products @ Yahoo! Inc., Matt Cohler, VP, Strategy and Business Operations at Facebook, James Hong, CEO of HOTorNOt.com and Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures.

The theme of the event was the building and monetization of sustainable online communities.

There was consensus on a number of issues raised, including the fact that these communities are generating profit from the 18-24 year old audience that had been disregarded in the past. James Hong claimed that his company expected people to keep interest in the site for about 6 months, and made money off providing a parallel dating service. HOTorNOT survived the .com crash because it offered a product that forces a reaction (clicking to rate a person’s “hotness”).

Brad talked about how after buying Flickr, they decided to keep its identity and to keep the viral advertising model that made Flickr successful -in that case, people learning about Flickr
through friends’ and families’ sharing their photos on that site.

Safa challenged the panelists with the idea that without keeping one’s audience captive for more than a mere few months, it will be hard to keep the momentum going for many social networks that believe they’ll keep the impetus.

Gus Tai seemed to believe that the money could be gleaned in a variety of methods and there was a large number of untapped markets of online communities that will thrive in the new world of social networks.

Apparently many people agree, including Google’s management that shelled out $1.65 billion to acquire on Monday YouTube.

This segment is a part in the series : Video