SuperFan, taking affinities further
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Social networks are partly about broadcasting information to a far-flung audience, and partly about establishing your identity (or the one you’d like to have). Facebook users, for instance, can publicize lists of their friends, their favorite bands, their tastes in movies and their fealty to particular consumer brands. The new site SuperFan distills the experience of social networking down to the public list of affinities, expanded beyond entertainment and products to a wide array of historical figures, places and even ideas.
Created by the team that developed Tickle.com (the source of many an online personality test), SuperFan plans to make money by selling credits that its members can use to control fan pages and targeted advertisements. More interesting to me, though, is how SuperFan functions as an overlay onto YouTube (and, eventually, other online video sites). Most of the items in SuperFan’s inventory of user likes and dislikes include links to images and YouTube videos posted by users. In other words, the site acts as a collection of favorites. ‘We really want this to be driven by the fans,’ said Rick Marini, the site’s founder and chief executive. That’s a bit different from social-media sites such as TVLoop and First on Mars, where users’ likes and dislikes can help guide others to choice nuggets within the vast amount of content available. SuperFan moves in the other direction, starting from scratch and offering only the material that’s drawn a reaction (good or bad) from its members. It also helps users discover content in more indirect ways than other social-media sites. For example, you might track down the members who share your love of death metal or Jonathan Lethem (or both!) to see what movies or TV shows they recommend. My guess is, that’s a technique better suited for those with eclectic tastes.
SuperFan will probably have to attract far more users to become a compelling media portal. But Marini seems to believe that the site’s main appeal will be the platform it provides for declaiming one’s loyalties. ‘Everything that defines who you are, you can express on the site,’ he said. It takes more time to do that than some people may want to invest, and the process of suggesting a favorite not already in SuperFan’s database is laborious. In fact, the site reviews the new nominees to make sure they might appeal to other users, too. ‘We want to include those people, those bands’ that users suggest, Marini said, ‘but I don’t want to put in ‘I’m a fan of my cat.’ That’s not interesting to the community. There is a gray area we have to get through each day on what makes the cut.’ That strikes me as both arbitrary and not particularly effective at weeding out the things the site really should be concerned about, namely, marketers creating bogus users to pump up their clients.
Each item has a ‘SuperFan’ who controls some elements of its fan page. To become a SuperFan, you have to either claim that spot before anyone else does or spend SuperFan credits to buy your way to the top of the heap. The site awards credits for creating or uploading content, but it also sells them. Those sales will be the site’s main revenue stream, Marini said. It also hopes to command higher-than-average rates from advertisers because of its ability to target their pitches. According to Marini, SuperFan can offer advertisers a more complete profile of its users than other social networks ‘because we know everything you love in life.’ He added that the company won’t share personally identifiable information with advertisers; instead, it will put their pitches in front of users who match the profiles they’re interested in. Still, the more accurate the targeting, the more unsettling the practice may be to users. There’s also a limit to how narrow advertisers want to make their pitches; at some point, targeting yields an audience that’s just too small to be interesting.
-- Jon Healey
Healey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division.
