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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Classmates Paid Community Puts Nostalgic Content Up FrontFriday, February 25, 2011 The trend this year seems to have been for content to get closer to e-commerce. In the case of the relaunched MemoryLane.com (Classmates.com until this week), the longstanding paid community of school buddies is making content a more integral part of the commerce mix. For nearly a decade, Classmates.com has filled the remnant inventory on billions of display ads with invitations for find old classmates. The subscription site organizes people around their old classes for forums, reunions and online picture posting. In the last year, the company has been using nostalgia as a hook for acquiring users and reminding people of the songs and TV shows they loved in their high school years. That marketing approach appears to have become a new direction for the site’s content. MemoryLane.com now compiles images from old TV shows and from such legendary magazines as Life and Saturday Evening Post. The Classmates features still form the bedrock of MemoryLane.com, but now the All Access Pass of $39 a year or $15 a quarter accesses a library of digitized high school yearbooks as well as every issue of Life, Look, Sport, and Saturday Evening Post that was published between the 1940s and 1990s. There are also newsreels, sports clips, album cover art, movie trailers and song samples. “MemoryLane.com provides a completely new and unique nostalgia experience,” says Mark Goldston, CEO of parent United Online. “With one click, visitors can travel back in time to any year between 1940 and 1999 and immerse themselves in the sights and sounds that made that year memorable and unique.” According to the company, it has licensed rights to use the nostalgic content, including the back issues of magazines, which are presented in digital magazine format. It plans to expand that portfolio of magazine content in the future as well. An extensive TV and cross-media campaign is planned to introduce the new brand identity. In fact, the new content model also allows for a broader range of revenue sources. With samples and images of older products as core to the MemoryLane.com content experience, the site can link to purchase opportunities for some of these items to Amazon. In this way, shift in content strategy actually opens up greater opportunities for affiliate e-commerce revenue. As well, the emphasis on media in the nostalgic content should help the company open up new markets for its own on-site advertising network. In a conference call with investors yesterday (Feb. 24) Goldston said, "Our belief is that if we can improve upon engagement measures with all this new content, we’ll have ample opportunity to monetize the new site through subscriptions, merchandise sales, pay-per-view and potentially other avenues." Currently, MemoryLane.com has 57 million registered users. Like its predecessor Classmates.com, MemoryLane.com works on a freemium model that teases with very limited access before introducing users to the pay wall. At MemoryLane.com, for instance, clicking into a magazine issue to peruse will get consumers a few pages of nostalgia before a prompt to subscribe. The company also announced that unlike previous versions of the model, MemoryLane.com would not require registration for access to free content, and additional models for monthly and day-pass access would help lower the barriers to entry. But the use of content throughout the Classmates experience is actually quite effective and ingenious. When users drop into their classmates folder of fellow graduates, the page also includes the “Sights and Sounds” around their high school years. The combination of edited content and community sculpts a unique environment that other publishers may want to mimic. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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