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Standard at the New Standard: The Game of News
Diehards have tried to revive The Industry Standard, the original dot-com tome that went bust in 2001, more than once over the years. But even their most recent efforts have been met with, at best, muted enthusiasm. More evidence of a bubble, the New York Times declared of the latest revival; can the market bear one more tech pub? PaidContent asked. No one’s ever really thought a rerun of the house-party-throwing-new-economy-cheerleader was a good idea. (Wait a second…)
But this time the Standard holdouts and their patrons at IDG are onto something with The Standard deux (which comes out of beta today) — it’s just that this time what they’re onto isn’t really news, but gaming.
Matt McAlister is one of the editorial old guard still involved. Derek Butcher, who briefed us, is the techie-GM now running the show from IDG. (IDG held a majority stake in the first Standard, bought its assets out of bankruptcy for $1 million, and now owns the new version outright).
Sure the new Standard will have news, but this time it’s not being churned out by an expensive staff holed up in expensive downtown digs. This time, Butcher says proudly, they’re doing editorial on-the-cheap: “standard” news stories (appearing in the left column in the screen shot below) will be mostly non-exclusive content collected from IDG’s own news service (they have hundreds of reporters), from freelancers, or from syndication deals with third-party bloggers — one such deal is with VentureBeat.
More “differentiating stuff,” Butcher says, will come in the form of analysis from folks like VCs Fred Wilson and Guy Kawasaki, or contributors from WIRED.com and The Economist (which doesn’t sound so cheap).
“There were so many different voices out there, a lot of them are really great, so we decided on a roll-up, a one-stop resource of what people are saying,” Butcher says. (Techmeme already does a great job at this.)
But the unique thing on the new Standard — and the main reason anyone will choose to add it to their frenzied RSS feeds — is “Featured predictions.” This is where readers get to, as Butcher puts it, “place bets on whether news events will happen — like if Apple will sell 10 million iPhones.” (Not such interesting odds there, but we get the point.)
Registered readers can suggest a prediction (editors vet the prognosticators prior to publication) or use virtual Standard coin to place their bets on the outcomes. Pay-out is 100 (in virtual dollars, of course; this is a cheap operation), but if you’re any good at predicting things, like whether Yahoo or not will get a white knight, your virtual net worth will ramp.
Good betters can exchange their winnings for prizes like a Slingbox, free ad space on the site, or stuff that’s harder to come by: passes to the keynote at Macworld, for example, or dinner with a prominent editorial contributor — even a briefing with IDG Ventures (a very valuable pay-out, if you’re a startup founder.)
But the big beneficiary of making a game out of the news this way will be the Standard: Butcher has an IDC researcher whose sole job is to pull data from the “predictive activity” and correlate it to Standard reader demographics. Butcher will then turn around, package the data, and sell it into the IT channel. As he explained:
“What if our data shows that CTOs are all ‘betting long’ on Apple selling 10 million iPhones by December, and at the same time ‘betting short’ on RIMM or Palm gaining share? There are [people] in the IT, financial and media sectors who’d like to know.”
And marketers who will pay the Standard and IDG big bucks to tell them, first. Most of what Standard Duex does is just retread. But the betting stuff is genuinely fun. It’s also a creative — albeit cheeky — way to push the relaunch above the fray, to where readers already overwhelmed by content will not only notice, but hopefully, get hooked.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, there will be parties again — eventually, according to Butcher. “But this time around,” he noted, “we want make sure we’re economically responsible.”
The Industry Standard 2.0: Their Analysis, Your Predictions
The Industry Standard—the once high-flying, and then hardest-falling, magazine of the dotcom era—is relaunching today in a public beta, nearly seven years after the original media outlet went bankrupt. It would be all too easy to write this off as a counter-indicator signaling that the current Web 2.0 mania has peaked. And perhaps that is exactly what it is. The brand carries with it so much baggage that it may be difficult to move beyond what it stands for in the collective consciousness: the excesses of Silicon Valley.
If its parent, IDG, had not bought the assets of the original Standard out of bankruptcy court for about $1 million half a dozen years ago, the site would have been called something completely different and the comparison would never be made. But they weighed that baggage against the potential boost they hope the site will get from the brand recognition the name still commands even after all of these years.
This time around, though, The Industry Standard is a Web-only property with decidedly less ambition and a new twist on generating content from its audience. The site will cover some of the same ground as its predecessor (Internet businesses, online media, venture capital). But it will focus more on analysis than news, and involve its audience in making collective predictions about industry and company trends through a prediction market set up as a simple betting pool.
The plan is to bring in news feeds from other sources, and build a reputation for good industry analysis from regular contributors including marketing guru Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and blogger Matt Marshall. The site will also contract with freelance journalists to write 300-to-500-word posts on Web companies and technology topics. Each contributor will be limited to three posts a week, to make sure no one writer dominates the conversation. “It’s like the Huffington Post,” says general manager Derek Butcher, “with the key difference that we will actually pay our contributors.” Breaking news will be included too, but mostly as feeds from other sources.
The predictions aspect of the site is probably what makes it most novel. “We want great analaysis that helps re-establish the brand,” says Butcher, “but the prediction market is the pageview driver.” On the home page, there are predictions for events such as “Yahoo will accept Microsoft’s acquisition offer” or “Q1 online ad revenues will be up from 2007.” The predictions are expressed as percentage probabilities based on how many people bet each way. When you register as a member, you receive $100,000 in pretend money to bet on questions across the site. Unlike regular voting or polling, you can make your vote count more by betting more money. The readers who end up making the best predictions will see their names pop up on a leaderboard on the site.
There are plenty of other sites that also try to generate collective wisdom using prediction markets, including HubDub, Trendio, and Yahoo’s Tech Buzz Game. The problem with most of them is getting enough smart people to participate on a regular basis. The new Industry Standard is trying to crack that nut by baking the predictive betting right into the core of the site. You read a story about Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo, and then you add your own two cents by predicting what will happen. Butcher plans to soon make it easy for people to grab any prediction as a widget and put it on their own blog or Facebook page as a syndication strategy.
Whether or not anyone will pay attention to the new Industry Standard, its expert pontificators, or its readers predictions will depend on how good the analysis and predictions will be. Insightful commentary should result in better informed predictions. But prediction markets work best when there is something real at stake—money or reputation, generally. When it is play money and anonymous usernames, as is the case here, my prediction is that it will be seen as nothing more than a gimmick. Anyone care to place a bet on that?
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