MatthewVB

This week I take a look at what Stanford (or HBS) in 2005 called ezboard, but today is known as Yoku. Yoku is an online discussion board platform, no different than Ning, Yahoo! Message Boards, or even (a stretch perhaps) Google Groups. The question posed is: how does Yoku make money? Many discussion boards, like those above, are free – and now even more open source technologies exist that hosts can install themselves (Vanilla, BBPress, etc.).

Yoku makes money in two ways: ad-based revenue shown in headers and footers, and subscriptions via their Gold Ad-Free Community. For communities with less than 50,000 page views / month, the gold plan at $6/month removes the ads from the screen – allowing users to browse without distraction. I’ll tell you one thing – this company is headed for the deadpool. Why? Simple: too many outlets provide this service for free and the ad revenue alone can’t support what Yoku wants to do. Sure, chat, photo galleries, and other widgets are great – but other online communities <cough> Facebook </cough> allow you to do that for free — and they have a far wider reach.

I think the only thing stopping a current community member of Yoku from moving on is that their discussions and history are tied up in the platform. It’s an instant death if Yoku allows you to export your discussions – and even faster if another platform could find out how to import Yoku data. All of the features they’re providing are at a commodity level for Internet users. If you don’t have email on your site – forget it. No profiles? Don’t waste my time.

The days of paid bulletin boards are over. Clean up shop and over something innovative. Yah, yah. You can provide my community with a ‘secure and closed area so people won’t bug us,’ but that’s not what online communities of today want. People want to be found so others join their communities. Take Ning – a great platform. It’s universal login allows me to join one community, and use that login across multitudes of communities that are all free! Sure, Yoku does this too, but Ning isn’t going to bother me with pop-ups or pointless ads (they do have one on the side – but I’ve never noticed it until now when I’ve intentionally looked for it.).

I really hope for the shareholders that Yoku was a company that bought ezboard and not just the name of their latest creation. Online reports that Yoku was the name of their beta software from 2005 that took 3 years (yes, 3 years!) to finalize once it was first unveiled. (Seriously – what took so long? I’m sure you spent at least 2 more years before that working on it, regardless of what’s admitted in public or not. I mean, really? 5 years for Web site development?) It’s time to pack up shop, close down, call it a day, sell the networks off, migrate them over, and join Geocities. Follow Yahoo!’s move…do it quietly.

Update: 1.23.10@7:18p: I figure I should add a bit of the case to this. The question the author poses is: what should ezboard do in 2005 to increase revenues and to roll out a new subscription service. At the time the gold program existed, but had low-enrollment. The migration to the new plan also required the answer to: do all customers at once, or do a slow roll-out. Google is known for slow roll-outs of new features, but giving all users at once makes the system universal and leaves little question to new users. I stand by my notes above that the CEO (Robert Labatt) should work on a sale rather than pushing forward with trying to revise revenue streams.

Update: 1.26.10@9:30p: Just a point of clarification – Yoku was named in 2005, but wasn’t released until 2008 – that was the 3 year development lag I was referencing.