It's Rishi

Forums are a big part of my online life. I spend at least 5-10 hours per week reading and posting on forum message boards. I’m far from alone. The largest forums on the web have well over a million members and have tens of thousands of posts every single day. Each forum, whether five hundred members or five million members, represents a community of people who enjoy sharing their thoughts, knowledge and experiences with one another. Some genre-specific communities, like Bimmerforums are focused on BMW discussions while many others are general interest and host discussions on a variety of topics.

For the most part, the only activity on these forums is the message board. There’s none of the other forms of interaction like blogging, photo sharing, friend networks, etc. that you’ll find on a typical social networking site. Where forums traditionally focus on topic-based discussion, social networking sites are all about connecting people in many different ways in order to foster interaction.

There’s thousands of forums on the Web which means there are thousands of these tight user communities. Each one of these forums represents sort of a cluster of interaction in the vast space that is the Web. So you have thousands of these clusters just floating in Internet space. Why not enable these forum communities to interact in the many different ways that you can on social networking sites? Furthermore, why not turn these forum communities into formalized social networks and then, for the first time, connect all these thousands of forum communities together?

Well, that’s what a new company called Zoints is trying to do. Zoints is very similar to your typical social networking site such as MySpace but it has a couple very important distinctions. The main distinction being that Zoints enables users to associate themselves with communities within the site. Each community represent an existing forum on the Web. Zoints has developed custom integration with many of the popular forum software packages. Forum owners who want to integrate Zoints into their forum can apparently do so quite easily. Once a forum has integrated Zoints, a forum user can browse the profiles of other forum members, add them as friends, and all of that other usual social networking stuff.

Zoints has already signed up over 200 forums, however only a few of those are large. Still, though, it looks like Zoints is doing a pretty good job hooking forums to sign on. From what I can tell, David Champan, the founder of Zoints, seems fairly well-connected in the world of forums so that’s going to help Zoints sign up communities. (Click here for an interview of David Champan on TheAdminZone forum.) The main selling points of Zoints to forum owners are that Zoints will help bring new members to the forum (Zoints claims that 50% of new Zoints users do not belong to any forums), increase ad revenue for the forum owner since the forum owner will get AdSense impressions on it’s own user’s pages, and helps to build the forum’s own brand and build a tighter community.

This all very much makes sense to me and I’m a big proponent of the power of forum communities. In my last company, Revunity, we built a product exclusively for forums, called Turf. Turf failed for a couple reasons: failed to effectively market it to forum owners and didn’t have forum software integration. It seems like Zoints is effectively tackling both of those issues.

I signed up on Zoints and, while not the prettiest site design, it seems pretty fast and has all the typical social networking features that you’d expect. Here are the issues I think Zoints will face:

• One basic question is do forum users want to expose their profiles to other members of the forum? Part of the reason forums are so popular is the sense of anonymity that users enjoy. You can be and act any way you want because people don’t know who you really are. All of the popular forum software packages already allow users to describe themselves in reasonable detail via user profiles. Yet few people do. Moreover you never see anybody using their real picture as their avatar. So will users want to publish their real-life photo albums for the rest of the forum to see?
• Will Zoints dilute the sense of community of each forum? For the most part, users on the larger forums that I’m on are very wary of new members (aka newbies or “noobs”) and generally fear mass influx of new members to their community. Each new member is seen as a small step towards the dilution of the existing community. Of course, some users turn out to be great additions to the community while others are detrimental. Right now, most new users to Bimmerforums likely come either from friends of current members or people who found the forum through a search engine while searching for BMW topics. In either of these situations, there’s a much better chance that the user will be a valuable forum member versus a user who stumbles upon Bimmerforums on Zoints. Ultimately, if the culture of a community gets diluted, this hurts the uniqueness of the forum and that is not in the interest of the forum members or forum owner.



• Right now Zoints is rapidly building its userbase by signing up forums and automatically getting access to all the members of each of these forums. The marketing pitch that Zoints makes to communities promises new members and ad revenue. While I do think that Zoints will help bring exposure to forums (this is especially important for small forums), I really doubt this is going to bring much in the way of ad revenue. As has been mentioned over and over, CPM rates on social networking sites is horribly low. Even at $1 CPM (which is very, very optimistic), a hundred thousand profile page views is only $100 in ad revenue. And since the forum owner only gets a portion of the total impressions, this is more like $50 (and again this is based on a very, very optimistic CPM). The fact is, Zoints is getting way the better deal out of its partnerships with forums. Zoints is getting the forum’s userbase for dirt cheap (the only cost is the ad-sharing). It’s a smart strategy but if forum members become dissatisfied, the forum relationships could quickly turn sour. Of course, once Zoints has sucked up the forum’s userbase, if the forum wants to walk away at that point, I don’t think Zoints will be too teary eyed. They’ll have gotten what they wanted: the forum’s users to become Zoint members.
• While forums are a big part of my online life, that is not true for the majority of Internet users. In fact, I recall a statistic that something like only 15% of Internet users visit atleast one forum on a regular basis. If even 50% of these users are on Zoints, that’s only 7.5% of the Internet population. For the rest of the 92.5% of people, I just don’t see any reason for them to migrate to Zoints from MySpace, Facebook, and other established social networks. Furthermore, if I’m going to invest time into building a profile, I’m going to do it on the social network that has the largest reach.
• This leads me to the biggest issue that I see for Zoints. MySpace (and other social networks) can easily add a “Forum/Other Communities” affiliation type to user profiles like they currently do with fraternities, clubs, companies, etc. Users could then add which forums they’re a member of and users could then search profiles by forum membership. Voila! You’ve pretty much got Zoints.