Retaining Members at Newsvine

Newsvine is a large and active online community, with over 500,000 users and a traffic rank of 1,548 (Alexa 2008). These users come from around the globe and many will undoubtedly never meet each other. Newsvine also has content submissions that cover most conceivable topics and commentary that spans the ideological spectrum. These factors could easily make Newsvine feel overwhelming and alienating to new users. Despite this, it is clearly in the interest of Newsvine to retain a large user-base. Encouraging user retention while attracting new users to Newsvine is a complicated problem, but one factor can help to resolve both of these issues, namely the formation of groups.

Groups are a common and effective way to promote community online. Kim argues that, "If your goal is to build a robust, large-scale community, then fostering member-run subgroups should be an integral part of your community strategy" (Kim pg 309, 2000). Because of the geographical dispersions of Newsvine users it is unlikely that they will ever meet each other. As a result groups are more likely to form around the users interest in a given topic, than their attachment to other users. According to Ren, this type of attachment is indicative of identity-based groups (Ren et. al, 2007). Ren states that identity-based communities should have clear mission statements and policies to keep conversation on-topic. Together these ideas suggest that groups at Newsvine with more focused discussions and identities will encourage a higher level of retention among new users.

The goal of retaining new users involves multiple stakeholders at Newsvine. Specifically it involves: new users looking for information on a topic, senior users who have information on the topic and the Newsvine administrators who provide the infrastructure that supports the interaction. The goal of retaining users is clearly in the interest of the site's administrators, because they benefit from ad revenue generated by users on the site. The senior users benefit from new users because new users will help to extend the agenda of a group. Furthermore, new users also bring in new knowledge, perspectives, and energy. When new users are able to connect with a new community that they are interested in, they benefit by learning from the community. So, in theory, retaining new users should be in all the stakeholders' interests.

Design Elements for Groups at Newsvine

Newsvine has several types of groups. The one that new users are most likely to be exposed to are the self-governed "public groups". The Newsvine group information page states that, "Sometimes a group of contributors would like to self-organize around a particular topic. Examples might be a 'green' group discussing environmental issues or a 'food' group discussing urban hipster cuisine" (Newsvine 2008). This demonstrates that Newsvine hopes to encourage groups to have a more tangible focus. While having a tangible focus was a component for identity-based groups, the main feature that encourages focus in the community is how the discussion for groups is organized.

When an article is submitted--or "Seeded" as it is called--to Newsvine it can be seeded to all of Newsvine, just a group, or both all of Newsvine and a group. All Newsvine users are able to see a tab for both the discussions that are public and the discussions for the group. However, if a non-member tries to comment in a group discussion that they are not a member of, a statement will appear above the comment field and they will be prohibited from posting.

Several features about this system allow users to derive more value from their conversations. The way that the value of groups is delivered to users is through conversations. Arguello notes that, "Whether they are explicitly soliciting information or assistance or implicitly seeking to direct the group's attention toward topics in which they are interested, individuals who attempt to start conversations are trying to increase the likelihood that the group will provide benefits they value" (Arguello et. al, pg 1, 2006). Therefore, new users can only be expected to remain a part of a group if the group meets their needs better than alternative groups. By restricting the number of users to just the members of the group, the discussion can have greater depth and stay more specific to the interests of the group members. Another factor that influences the efficacy of this design alternative is the number of users that are able to converse. The Newsvine groups are self-selecting for a specific topic or purpose, as a result their membership base is limited. While this helps to create a more congenial environment it also limits the amount of interaction that a member is exposed to. According to Arguello, higher communication volume results in lowers return rates in online groups. However, with too few messages the activity will not be sufficient to sustain conversation and retention will also suffer (Arguello et. al, pg 2, 2006).

For this paper I defined retention simply as users who comment once and return again within the next month to submit content or discuss articles. I chose this definition because it is not possible for me to detect users who create accounts but do not comment or submit content. To try and determine the rate of retention I looked at the most popular article from February 2008 and then checked to see if any of the comments came from new users. I then checked to see if any of the new users had returned again to post after their initial comments. The information on users' profiles indicates the month that the account was made but not the day; therefore, it is not possible to determine if these comments represented the user's first comment. However, this method does allow me to determine if new users are returning after their first month of use.

After surveying the top article at Newsvine in February 2008 it seems more likely that inactivity in the discussion is more of an issue than communication overload. Furthermore, among all the top articles currently on Newsvine, I never found an example in which anyone had commented in any discussion other than the public discussion.

I found three new users who had commented on the top article from February 2008 and all of them were still active users. Each had posted at lease one article in the past week and commented at least once in the past week. Furthermore, each of these users is a member of at least one group. Like all other users I didn't find any instance of these users commenting in any forum other than the public forum. This finding suggests to me that part of the value of discussing articles on Newsvine comes from having a larger number of respondents or being able to discuss articles with people who have different viewpoints from your own. The idea that users benefit from interaction with people with diverging viewpoints is supported by the comments on one new users profile (Figure 3). It states, "I love to express my opinion and learn from the opinions of others."

Despite the fact that the group commenting system is not being utilized currently, it could still be valuable for the site. One function that might be useful for focusing the discussions, while allowing different groups to interact, would be if group member's comments were copied to that group's discussion while also remaining in the public discussion. This would allow users to maintain the public discussion but would also make it easier to assess the opinions of users from different intellectual camps. Users could view the messages in the different groups to find out who was a part of each group, which would help them understand more about the discussion as well.

Community Characteristics of Newsvine

A few characteristics contribute to the poor usage of the group discussion forums. The forum's goal is to focus the conversation and prevent off-topic discussion. However, as I have mentioned in previous papers, the discussions on Newsvine are generally rather civil. It is Newsvine's characteristic civility that undermines the effectiveness of the commenting system. If the conversations were more contentious, then it is likely that people would retreat to their ideological camps to discuss news articles. But, because people on Newsvine tend to be respectful of others, there is less need.

Another characteristic that might make this design more useful would be if Newsvine were to have a much larger population. Focusing the conversation by group, so that the cohesion of a conversation was maintained, would be more necessary if the conversation had thousands of comments rather than only hundreds.

As Arguello notes, higher communication volume lowers return rates in online groups (Arguello et. al, pg 2, 2006). At this stage Newsvine doesn't seem to suffer from this issue, but a large community could potentially face diminished communication volume.

In conclusion, creating a stronger focus for groups by providing groups with private forums doesn't seem to contribute to user retention. Users seemed inclined to return to Newsvine without engaging in discussions in the group forums at all. This is because users seem to get more value out of having conversations with people who are not like minded than by only discussing topics with members of their groups. If the number of users at Newsvine were to increase significantly then having discussions that were based around groups would be more significant. Currently though the civility of Newsvine's forums, and the reasonably low population of users, seems to make having separate forums unnecessary.

Works Cited

Alexa.com. Newsvine.com–Traffic Details from Alexa. Retrieved May 15 2008, from http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/newsvine.com
Arguello, J., Butler, B.S., Joyce, L., Kraut, R., Ling, K.S., Rosé, C., and Wang, X. "Foundations for Successful Individual-Group Interactions in Online Communities," Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2006. Kim, A. J. (2000). Community building on the Web. Berkeley, CA, Peachpit Press. Newsvine.com. Newsvine - Newsvine Groups Overview and Help. Retrieved May 15 2008, from http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/help/groups
Ren, Y., Kraut, R.E., and Kiesler, S. "Applying Common Identity and Bond Theory to Design of Online Communities," Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, Atlanta, GA, 2006.

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