A collaboration site makes money from advertising in the same way a media site does. But early on, as the site is trying to grow its user community so that it becomes a big enough player to command good advertising, it’s more focused on ensuring that the site contains valuable content that is well regarded by search engines, that it’s retaining a vibrant user community, and that the site is growing virally.

In the beginning, collaboration sites may need to seed content manually. Wikipedia recruited thousands of librarians to kick off the creation of its content, and Flickr relied on manual rankings of published pictures by its editors until the community was big enough to vote for popular images on its own. Since most online communities are collaboration sites, we’ll look at some metrics for monitoring these kinds of sites in the community section of the book.

Wikipedia.com, Facebook.com, and Slideshare.com fall within this category. Many internal sites, such as intranets built on SharePoint or wikis like Socialtext, use similar KPIs to externally facing collaboration sites.

Business Model

Figure 2-3 illustrates the basic elements of a collaboration site’s business model.

Figure 2-3. Elements of a collaboration site’s business model

1. A visitor comes to the site via an invitation, a social network recommendation, organic search, word of mouth or search results.

2. The visitor uses the site, hopefully creating content in the form of comments, uploads, and postings.

3. On the other hand, the visitor could create “bad” content, such as link spam or offensive content.

4. The content on the site is judged by subsequent search indexes, which affect the site’s search ranking.

5. The visitor may engage with the site by subscribing to comment threads, befriending other users, voting on content, and so on, which encourages him to return.

6. In time, the visitor may also invite members of his social graph to join the site, leading to a larger user base.

7. On the other hand, he may stop using the site, disengaging and resulting in “stale” content.