Think back to the bad old days of the Web–way back, say four years ago. Remember those cute, yellow “site under construction” logos with the digging man? You don’t see those around much any more.
Today it goes without saying: If a site is not constantly under reconstruction, it’s just one click short of becoming another 404 error on the cyberspacial roadside.
In Deja.com, we have a case study in big-time remodeling. This is a major Web company that appears to be simultaneously building two different structures on the same piece of Web real estate.
The rather curious case of Deja’s split personality began on March 1, when the company announced it would remodel its by-shoppers-for-shoppers product-review service to be a “full-featured buyer’s portal.”
Simultaneous with the announcement of this “precision buying service,” Deja.com announced it was relegating its Usenet newsgroups service to a separate sub-site, www.deja.com/usenet. The latest remodeling comes at a time when competition in the crowded product-recommendation sector of the Web is nearing a boil. Other well-funded, established brands such as Epinions.com, Productopia and ConsumerReview.com are all fighting for traffic in what’s essentially the same space.
Deja.com, a New York company with operations in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, didn’t just show up on the Web yesterday. It was born in 1995 as Deja News and enjoyed immediate success as a Web-based portal into the wild and wooly world of Usenet newsgroups, the Net’s prime venue for posted discussions on all topics under the sun.
Newcomers, familiar with the Web but not skilled with other Net applications, could now participate in Usenet’s tens of thousands of discussions with point-and-click ease. Old Usenet hands adored Deja News as well, because the company archived the great global forums, preserving discussions and information that would have vanished out of the system with time.
Unfortunately, putting a user-friendly front-end on Usenet was not a lucrative venture. The company needed to leverage the traffic it was generating into revenue.
Last May, the re-christened Deja.com switched to a hybrid model–it would keep Usenet and add consumer-to-consumer product ratings and recommendations. The rationale was that people already turned to Usenet for the advice of their peers when it came to buying decisions on everything from surfboards to stereo gear. The new, re-designed Deja.com would be Web Stop No. 1 for such buying advice.
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In addition to targeted banner ads on the Usenet side, Deja.com could open two other significant revenue streams on the product-recommendation side: a slice of e-commerce revenues from sales that originated at the Deja.com site and payments from merchants who wanted premium positioning on Deja.com for their commerce links.
Now, we’re to Deja.com’s third incarnation. The Usenet feed, which still draws the majority of the traffic, is now its own sub-site. And the consumer-to-consumer product review sections are gradually being made over with beefed-up content, including product specs, expert recommendations and comparative pricing. The new “precision buying service” is running in the computing-and-tech section. Other areas, including arts and entertainment, will roll out in coming months.
David Wilson, Deja’s senior vice president of products and the primary architect for the re-direction, professes to be unconcerned about pressure from ConsumerReview.com and other recommendation services. He believes the only real competitor with a similar offering–one-stop, full-featured consumer information and pricing–might be CNET.
“Before, we gave consumers a completely consumer-powered view of what were the best products to buy,” Wilson says. “Now, we give a complete set of tools for what to buy and where to buy it. You may see this as a third incarnation. But I think of it as delivering on the promise of what we started with the consumer rating service.”
Why, after building the product-review service through Usenet traffic, would Deja.com decide to now break the two apart? Wilson says the ratings service can now stand on its own and the company realizes that structurally the two services are very different beasts.
“When we initially came out with the ratings and review service, we needed to meld that with (Usenet) in order to get it the visibility it needed to create a critical mass of reviews,” Wilson says. “We had to get the (consumer-review area) in front of people’s faces in a fairly intrusive way.”
Now, he says the critical mass is there and it’s time to stop pushing the product-review content on the Usenet audience.
Perhaps the most puzzling part of the new arrangement is this: The company seems to recognize that it has two distinctly different products, yet it’s sticking with one brand name and one Web domain for both. Why not create two brands on two separate sites?
“That’s an investment issue,” Wilson says. “Building just one brand takes a pretty incredibly high investment and few companies would try to do two separate brands. … Yeah, I think there is a little bit of dissonance there. I think every company who has ever taken their strategic intent for what their brand is and moved it has experienced that kind of dissonance.”