How to Build an Online Community Part II

Apurv Pandit, Editor, PaGaLGuY.com
Continued from Part I..

Here are the rest of the points and specific examples that illustrate the challenges and lessons learned by us about the growth of a niche online community from our experience.

Hands-off Moderation

A community intending to be strong requires involved Administrators and Moderators who are themselves consumers of the website. Any user-generated content platform requires moderation to control abusive language, clutter and trolls. We choose moderators from our own community, who being users themselves empathize with other users and are able to serve the community better.

Secondly, moderation has to be minimal. The active-and-contributing-user to moderator ratio on PaGaLGuY is about 5,000:1. In a month, we generate about 25,000 posts on an average moderated by not more than 3 moderators. Our content at any given time is 99 percent free of abusive language, copyrighted content and troll users. Further, we have been able to easily train our users to Report Abuse in content to Moderators. As a result, no bad post gets overlooked. Moderation has to be minimal also in order to enable an environment of trust and sharing in the community.

Monetization

When we started monetizing the PaGaLGuY community four years after we started it, we realized that pushing down advertising content down users who had put in a lot of effort into building it would be unfair. We thus tried to create win-win situations by creating branding campaigns that benefited the client, the users we well as us. We started out with a lot of branding contests for clients where users stood to win prizes, etc.

One problem with niche communities is that of the conflict of interest between advertisers and user-generated content. We identified very soon was that being an unbiased platform, many of our prospective clients had received rather embarrassing reviews from users on PaGaLGuY.com. Quite understandably, many of those clients refused to advertise with us until we deleted content that showed them in poor light. Under no circumstances were we going to compromise on our integrity as administrators of the community. The only route left then was to explain and convince the client about Life, Universe and Everything in the world of user-generated content.

Our proposition to them was simple – if they did not make efforts to build their brand on PaGaLGuY, a lot of negative comments about them on the site would continue to harm them. On the other hand, if they embraced the comments as genuine market feedback and worked towards addressing those problems on PaGaLGuY and working on their brand building, they would be seen as companies that respected customer feedback and stood to regain credibility. It took efforts and we were able to convert most clients to our point of view and today we share a great relationship with many of them, despite the fact that Googling their name still brings up the link on PaGaLGuY where they have received negative feedback.

However at any point of time, compromising the fabric of the community would have meant the end of us. It would also have meant giving into a challenge rather than facing it.

Community Impact

A niche community often shows signs of becoming a change agent in its domain. The administrators of a community have to recognize this power for what it is and stand by its users. More than once, PaGaLGuY has been in the midst of a storm where users have identified telling loopholes in the functioning of well-known business schools. The most well-known of them was when Aaj Tak was flashing stories of a test-link to the CAT results being leaked prematurely on PaGaLGuY in 2004 nationwide.

It was an incident that could have sunk us. Similarly, there was an incident in July 2004 when a severe ragging incident was reported by a user in a top of the line business school, or when users reported that another well known advertising MBA school had bungled with its admission shortlist in 2005. Each time, we found that whistle blowers inside the community had reported genuine problems. Had we let our brains remain in our knees, the jerk reaction would have been to censor all of that. However, we chose to stand by our users and were able to successfully make b-schools completely rollback on the error.

We have found that it is possible for one to create, maintain and support tight and passionate online communities ethically while still remaining profitable. Is there a shorter way to do all of this (numbers + quality + tightness)? We’ll be glad to learn!