The bane of my existence currently is my ever increasing inbox of emails I need to respond to, and I am apparently only worsening the problem as I sign up for more and more social networks. There is the wild game recipe club, the used furniture network, the parenting pull your hair out network, the underwater basket weavers network, and…well you get the idea. I don’t actually belong to all of these clubs or social networks, but I can assure you they are out there with more then 3,600 clubs to join and be a part of online. One of the emails I get frequently is Classmates.com.
I was looking into this pre-social networking social network recently because I wanted to compare the use of it versus the use of Facebook. I get my login found out about the page where I could go to see friends and others, and when I tried to navigate to the next step, wham! The protective firewall dropped and I was shut out, barred, and could go no further. The next step was something that baffled me. They wanted me to join for a small monthly fee. There went the idea of using Classmates.com. Why? The answer to that is easy, I can use Facebook for free.
The catch-22 here is the fact that we are all asking Facebook to find ways to monetize and not make it intrusive, and then when a company like Classmates.com is monetizing, we tell them in order to compete they have to make it free. It’s like those arguments I have with my kids. The only one that understands the argument is 3 years old. Classmates.com is making money for being a part of its network, and Facebook is free to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. It’s like getting cable television and paying for it and having it available over the free airwaves.
Last time I looked Facebook was worth a boat load of money and it is all anyone is talking about. Classmates.com comes on the radar as a vehicle for spam and it is immediately ignored. There is no reason why Classmates.com should not be able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Facebook and take a large portion of its market share. I recently sent out a message over Twitter stating the same thing with the gist being, why would I use Classmates for pay when I can use Facebook for free? I had lots of responses to that Tweet stating the same thing.
I am not beating down Classmates here as that would not be constructive, but I think I have a solution that might work for them. Open up your application to everyone and bring down that wall. Thought sounded somewhat Reaganish didn’t it. It’s true however that they need to change their thinking. Instead having that mass database grow stale and have everyone treat Classmates like the spam king of email, shop that database as well. Those that are struggling, i.e. Yahoo, perhaps a purchase of classmates to take on the world of Facebook is a good move? Either way, we will see the likes of Classmates.com fade away as Facebook grows stronger, and then the next thing will come along and be better.
You are the Classmates.com CEO. How do you compete? I want to know how you take on Facebook free, when you are sitting on income already coming in?
