• by Mark Naples , October 7, 2004

Much has been made recently about community sites and online networking portals and tools. Friendster and LinkedIn come to mind. But, these are just the latest examples in an industry segment that continues to broaden and still has an enormous upside.

The community and networking site idea has been something of a capsule of what's most desirable about the Web to marketers in the first place. Provide self-selected cohorts with a compelling reason to gather, and give them other reasons to segment within that environment. Grow the community and before long, you've got a significant media asset to target against. This was some of the thinking behind Business to Business portals. Remember when every newly-minted MBA hit the streets talking about "industry verticals"? The mid-to-late 90s saw billions of dollars of venture capital enter first the enterprise software market, then the Web. Many people who bought into funds like Internet Capital Group (ICG) made a ton of money. That is, they made a ton of money unless they kept their investments there too long.

As with many boom industries, there were far more losers than winners in the long run: While people like Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, made hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of investors dropped billions of dollars on businesses they barely understood.

By 1999, along came multiple dating sites, and their growth seemed limitless, with Match.com, Yahoo! Personals, and Spring Street Networks charging subscription fees to consumers and premiums to advertisers while building and segmenting significant media assets of young consumers by their ZIP codes and area codes.

Dating sites combine the best and worst of the Web, with just a hint of salaciousness most of the time, and the promise of something greater all the time. They also have been extremely profitable and helped make Barry Diller into this segment's Robert Kraft (though neither man came to the table empty handed).

When dating sites first gained traction, it seemed unlikely that college-aged kids would participate. After all, colleges provide a ready-made, real-life community of like-mindedness and demographic similarity. Why join a virtual one? But, college kids do participate in big numbers, and in the past 18 months, some college community sites - not dating sites - have gained serious traction toward becoming their own industry sub-segment, led by CampusNetwork.com.

CampusNetwork is an updated version of the very popular Columbia University and Barnard College online network, CUCommunity.com. Originally launched in August of 2003, CUCommunity.com was the first online network dedicated to connecting students on college campuses, and fast became one of the most important forums of social interaction for Columbia students - connecting nearly 75 percent of the undergraduate student population by the end of its second semester.

In its latest incarnation, CampusNetwork offers its users a variety of new interactive features including teacher reviews, campus music (live music, featured artists, radio stations), courses (course descriptions, calendar), MyPhotos (unlimited photo-uploads, quick prints), and MyGroups (events calendar, online community).

This is a student run network, and its founders expect it to reach perhaps as many as 30 colleges and universities by next year. Its many features are free to its undergraduate and graduate school users, and it is staffed by volunteers on campus. The average user spends more than 30 minutes a day on CampusNetwork, an improbably high figure unless you factor how many different ways students can use the network, and not just for social networking and entertainment. The average user login also enjoys more than 100 page views daily.

"We wanted to create an online community that truly emulates the way people interact with one another in everyday life; so that this Web site becomes a component of our user's life, and not simply an auxiliary. And the response we have received from our users has been incredibly positive," said Wayne Ting of CampusNetwork.

With enormous universities like Penn State crafting their own deals with music sharing services, I guess it was just a matter of time before someone took advantage of what is perhaps the greatest fallow media asset online. The best part of this might just be that college students were already there. CampusNetwork.com just gave them a reason to gather. It seems pretty simple at this point, after the fact. That's why I'd expect it to succeed.