This is a guest post by Luke Mitchell, managing consultant with Reach Students, a digital marketing agency aimed at the student market
Once upon a time, students had a social network all to themselves. It required a university email address to access. Inside was an engaging mix of quirky profiles, subversive groups, weighty debates and fantastical conversations about obscene acts apparently committed by daytime television presenters. It was known as ‘The Facebook’. Then, sadly, it lost the The.
Today students share Facebook with everyone else, but if they don’t like it they have options. But do students want or need their own social network? Some may say that question was answered with the failure of Univillage, which came loudly into the market in 2006 with the backing of Brent Hoberman (now of MyDeco), only to bail out a year later.
That move may have had something to do with the launch of yougo, launched last year by the university admissions service UCAS. This connects UCAS applicants and students already at uni.
yougo has over 200,000 registered users, a figure that has grown in waves that correlate with key UCAS contact times: the organisation is in a unique position, easily able to reach hundreds of thousands of new university applicants each year. It is currently claiming to convert a quarter of them to yougo users.
Quickly, yougo has found that students do not want another Facebook all to themselves. But they have shown an interest in something else. In the years before they go to uni, up until the time they eventually arrive on campus, young people are very interested in a secure space online where they can chat and meet with other students who are following a similar path to them.
They are not looking to post Funwall messages and poke each other. They actually have a lot of serious stuff they want to find out.
yougo has responded to this and has started repositioning itself closer to the UCAS brand that students associate with a useful service rather than a fun hangout. They are now looking to pull in the 140,000 younger students they already have on their UCAS Card database and are considering how they can retain users through university to their first career move, by facilitating practical networking and discussion.
UCAS says yougo has met all its targets during the course of its short history. How can it have not? Via UCAS yougo has ‘free’ unrivalled access to thousands of youngsters from middle and high-income families. Clearly, UCAS’s entry into the socnet market has wide ramifications for any private sector startups trying to beak into the student space.
However, the survival and steady growth of yougo indicates that there might be further mileage in private student social networks. Though like yougo, survivors may need to find a ‘niche within the niche’.
At the other end the marketing resources spectrum, with no whopping database to plunder, is GroupSpaces.
The start-up, born out of Oxford University, is probably the sector’s most web-business savvy, having recently pitched to Silicon Valley and received good financial backing from tech-focussed angel investors in the UK.
They have a neat idea.
There are in excess of 25,000 clubs and societies in universities across the UK. Each one of them is organised autonomously by individual students – with a huge churn of personnel. Key members change on a yearly basis, sometimes more often. Each group organiser naturally brings their own systems and ideas, which means new websites and communication methods.
If you looked at the communication picture between students across the UK, you would get a nasty headache. It’s a jamboree that involves everything from Yahoo and Google groups, to Facebook pages, message boards and even wikis.
GroupSpaces has the opportunity to standardise and simplify communications for the entire clubs and societies community. It provides everything a group organiser needs to administer their membership, while keeping things simple, clean and functional. If every student group used the system, GroupSpaces would have perhaps a million students registered.
The idea makes a lot of sense, and has been taken up en-masse by Oxford’s 300-plus groups. The challenge for GroupSpaces will be penetrating the other hundred universities across the UK, each with their own politics and culture, and demonstrating to individualistic clubs and societies that GroupSpaces can make their lives easier.
Finally, the progress of Freewire TV is worth mentioning. This is a well branded IPTV service that streams into university halls of residence across the UK. It’s currently the country’s most subscribed IPTV provider, with over 40,000 customers receiving Freeview and premium channels through the JANET network.
Freewire’s owners, Inuk Networks, won a £9.5 million investment from TV broadcaster S4C and venture capital firm Wesley Clover. They have partnered with Cable & Wireless, meaning they can compete against Virgin to reach residential student customers in cabled towns.
There are a limited number of credible, student-only digital channels available to the marketer. IPTV, with its potential for audience targeting and interactivity, would be an irresistible advertising proposition in the bedrooms and lounges of 2 million students.
Interesting that UCAS are behind yougo.
About 9 years ago, I worked for StudentUK.com which was owned by W&J Linney and built their first ‘virtual community’ (as we called them abck then per-’social-networks’
) which had loads of info for students’ education, graduation and employment. This was also backed by UCAS Enterprises.
A major shareholding was acquired from then by Jarvis Plc, who were provider of infrastructure services to the Education sector (now more focussed on rail and plant industries).
The site seems offline for now, though I haven’t check up on it for a loooong time.
UCAS are putting together a nice little portfolio of sites they are involved with – yougofurther looks sounds (and looks) like a good idea and similar to something I discussed when I was based at HEFCE and they are also running Unistats.com – which despite some design and usability problems (IMHO) is a really useful site.
I wonder how usage of something like yougofurther stacks up against The Student Room though?
Hmmn. Now I’m wondering WTF YouGo is doing pimping eBay ads? If this is UCAS/Gov backed then what’s its relationship with eBay?!
Mike: At studentuk, it was supported by ads too.
I think a lot of student probably use ebay to get hold of cheaper stuff.
Also, from the link below the ad banner:
“Why yougo has ads
UCAS, which supports yougofurther.co.uk, is a registered charity. The money that yougo gets from advertising is used by UCAS to keep down the cost of the UCAS services, which ultimately helps students like you. “
We were filming at Oxford Uni’s Idea Idol last year and met the founders of Group Spaces they are extreamly passionate and intellegtent people:)
**extremely and intelligent ** ha ha sorry!… spelt correctly
I’ve always wondered about the long-term value of student propositions. Without a way to cheaply acquire new users (UCAS’s advantage) you are in the tough spot of building a relationship only to constantly lose it as the student moves on. The possibility of easy/cheap acquisition seems to be the point at which you win or lose this game.
@Paul – good point. With GroupSpaces we’re not too worried about this since we’re dealing primarily with groups (the student clubs and societies) rather than individual students. When the group leaders move on they hand over how things currently work to the next set of students – in fact one of the advantages of using GroupSpaces for a group is to ease this handover process!
@Paul Yes, this does make building a student offering hard and has been the downfall of many. But brands really want to reach this audience, so if you can quickly arrive at a situation where you get more from them than you spend on acquisition and everything else, then there is long term value.
@Kosso I remember studentuk.com well. I worked on its web 1.0 rival, nusonline.co.uk – and of course there was also virginstudent.com, another ‘big’ student site now gone. The problem for all those sites in my mind was that students do not recognise themselves as an interest group, unlike say mountain bikers, techies or butterfly collectors. They have a massive variety of interests because they are, after all, just people. You can’t cater for them very well through content. Also, I don’t think students like to be treated exclusively (with the exception of student discounts) and they often respond negatively to content targeting them as students. For yougo it’s a bit different, because they tap into a young person’s mindset at a specific time (”I’m off to uni!!”). It will be tough for them retaining the audience past freshers, which is no doubt why they want to tap more into the pre-Uni audience. Interestingly, UCAS are rightly doing exactly what NUS did with its web offering, which is returning to the refuge of doing what you do best and what your audience expects. In NUS’ case this was campaigns, welfare, discounts and supporting students’ unions. For sites like studentuk.com and virginstudent.com there was nothing for them to return to, since they were founded as ’student websites’.
Thanks for y’all interest in the article
The real b*gger about studentUK was that we specced it in its final incarnation as a social platform with blogging, groups (GroupSpaces are bang on the money here – this is what students *want* – comms/social tools) and basically most of the functionality in facebook. But those extras blew the dev budget, so it was back to articles, chat and forums (yawn). Although I don’t think the world was quite ready for the facebook beastorama or a brit copy back then anyhow, so it would probably have ended up much as it did. VCs were a bit thin on the ground back on 2001/2, sadly.
UCAS were an interesting shareholder, shall we say. They have a monopoly on student applicant data, and they charged *daft* rates for it (read their ratecard and weep) – I doubt much has changed there so it’s usually only the Army and banks that can afford to access it. If sUK had been able to leverage that database effectively, who knows, it might even be around today
but frankly, if I were UCAS I would have wanted to keep it all to myself, which is exactly what they’ve done.
The student marketplace is hard work – as well as the student websites all going titsup, most of the campus marketing companies have gone the same way in the last 5 years. Again, the NUS should have a monopoly here but never quite seems to grasp how to use it.
Yes, some brands want to reach students in higher education, but most just want to reach “da yoof” which is relatively easy. Reaching actual students is hard because media is evilly fragmented, and companies do not want to pay the overhead for that (or operate on 330+ campuses).
You sods – I’ve been trying not to think about this for 5 years. Luke – hope you’re well!
TTFN
Sounds good . There is a great new start-up that just came out . It is all self serve and it is also fully automated . It supports all types text ads, banners and video ads.For publishers , it offers the highest split of earnings you can find out there and much more. It caters to web and mobile Publishers and Advertisers . Web and Mobile Publishers can earn money easier than ever and registering is FREE. Please check it out : http://www.webmob-ad.com
@Paul,
You’re completely missing the boat here. If you create a way to cheaply acquire student customers every year as they come in, as long as you retain some of them on the back end, you have an incredible business model. Trust me, this is what we have been able to to accomplish with Higher One and the business was ranked #12 out of the 100 fasted growing privately held businesses in the US in 2008 (Entrepreneur Hot List). Quite the opposite of the student web sites and student focused marketing firms.
Maybe those models haven’t worked because they tend to focus on advertising versus making money by providing students with a useful or valuable service that students pay for. This tends to be because people feel that “students are poor.” This is in fact not the case. In terms of total income, students earn less, but when one looks at disposable income, students often have more disposable income than many other segments of the population, and they’re willing to spend it for things that provide value (this is what inherently makes them interesting to advertisers in addition to the potential for brand loyalty).
Luke – I’m surprised you didn’t mention Studentbeans.com. They’ve seen amazing growth in their database already despite only having been launched UK-wide last year. And they’re making enough money to reinvest in growing the business.
My money is on them to own the UK student demographic for the next few years.
@Sean Glass – I think we’re on the same boat here
“If you create a way to cheaply acquire student customers every year as they come in” The “if” is the bit I see as make or break and why the student market is so tough. You are running almost a purely acquisition based business as the repeat members only have a couple year window to target. This is why UCAS has a leg up as they have an inside track to acquisition if played right.
The short cycle and dependence on yearly acquisition also means it is easier to have competition break in because you are both really fighting for the same new members from scratch each year. And it does seem this demographic is always looking for the new hotness….
I see the reasons why the student market is attractive but it seems a hard slog compared to other demographics where you have to rely less on acquisition year on year out. I don’t know much about Higher One but if you guys have got the model sorted than kudos to you
@Sean Glass – Just looked at Higher One and now understand it’s not quite the same space as Yougo, groupspaces, etc. When writing I was thinking more of the social marketing/networks side of the student market rather than enterprise services (which seems to be closest to what you do). Sorry for any confusion.
First of all how can that author of this post say that univillage may have bombed because students may not want a student specific social network. Has the question been asked that univillage may have been the problem itself. It was a bland, cloned, uninspiring site. It had no kudos or branding but was a cynical attempt to tap into social networking trend with no originaltiy or usp.
They like other sites mentioned in this article and elsewhere, conducted a lot of PR hype at launch before having the substance of backing it up. I have bookmarked articles in publications such as the guardian of brent hoberman claiming they had 30,000+ students singed up in freshers week and would have all freshers signed up by xmas 2006.
Also, registered users is one thing, how active they are, loyal and how regular they use it are the key. At uni people sign up to a number of things which they later pay little or no attention to.
Also, this UCAS backed yougo site is hyped in this article. How is its 200,000 user figure verified? Looking in the website this figure seems greatly over inflated (a bit like univillage, ppl party etc.) Univillage, promoted their site just prior to start of academic year in Sep 06, by having a promotional letter sent with all UCAS correspondence for new uni students. So obviously they had the reach (just like the article claims UCAS have), so how come they bombed? It is not simply a matter of reach if your site/service does not match up. Another site may have a smaller reach initially and through word of mouth end up having a huge impact.
The yougo site is very reminiscent of univilllage, very bland, some ebay adverts wrapped around, a competition here and there nothing greatly appealing. Or a bit like the NUS site with some social networking tagged on to it. It is not a pioneering proposition in terms of a brand, functionality, or design.
Group Spaces sounds like a good idea to people who are older and went to univeristy along time ago or to investors etc. At a pro-active tightly knight uni like oxford where societies, clubs play a big part then it has a place. But for the mahority of uni’s (as hinted in the article), people don’t use societies as a main means of meeting peers and communicaiton. Sure at the start of uni at freshers, people sign up to this society and that only never to bother again after the novelty has worn off. Or alternatively may use a site like it occassionaly to find out that say the film club has a party on. Look at sportsbase.co.uk or isporty all claiming to aggregate clubs etc. together where there is intra-communicaiton between members but these have not taken off.
Also, to obtain funding is great PR etc. but does not mean anything when it comes to the crunch of gettting highly active members, having a sustainable business model etc.
Sean Glass’s comment was spot on, saying how the whole business model of advertising is fundamentally weak.
The comment about student beans is hilarious of course it is a growing site but it is a discount voucher site not some powerful student medium.
Also, the statement that students may not want to be sectioned off is totally due to a diversity of interests etc. is totally off the mark. Has anyone heard of MySpace (where millions of individuals come together) and there has been press coverage that the way foward in the social networking arena is niche markets. Just as there is a mass market player such as Tesco or Ford there will always be successful niche players such as Waitrose, Porsche.
One site such as myspace can’t be all things to all people, whereas a student specific site can offer a much more bespoke service. Students love keeping in their own crowd, due to being same age, similar stage in life etc. It was exactly this exclusivity that made Facebook an initial success in the states, it had a platform of student users. Knowing that this was a niche and limited market (in terms of numbers) they wanted to go for the mass market and opened up to everyone.
Also, FaceBook is not widely adopted in U.K univerisites as the media has led us to believe. When it first launched in the U.K around Se 05 it was limited to around 15-20 uni’s and these were the hier tier uni’s etc. Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL etc. and in about 6-10 of the uni’s it did a great job of penetrating these uni’s to a great extent. However once they opened access to all in Sep 06 in the U.K it became flooded with the post 25 crowd etc. and media types and was hyped and hyped. It was then assumed that in its infancy in the U.K it had loads of students on there. Apart from the top six it hardly has and still doesn’t have many students on there using it regularly. A lot of students at these ‘top uni’s’ became disillusioned with FaceBook when everyone started using it. Young people will always want something that does not become too mainstream as it loses its appeal and value. FB when student only was the opposite to myspace, select crowd, private, simple, easy to use. By opening up to all and with endless useless appliactions and gimmicks, people having ‘hundreds of so called friends’ it has lost what made it attractive in the firstplace to students. With employers on there and lecturers etc. and the ‘older’ crowd this has further reduced its cachet amongst the student market.
Another thing that frustrates the founders of web startups, is these so called consultants who claim to know the youth market and charge companies for their expertise. If they have done it with their won company then they have the credibilty to talk, like Michael Birch from Bebo can etc.
You may wonder who is writing this. I am a close friend of some recent graduates who have been running a pioneering, powerful student based site (funded by business angels) since last january (beta) october (full launch). I keep an eye out for them for any such related articles and after knowing what they have done and what they have gone through, how hard it is to gain traction, how hard it has been and can comment so specifically as shown above. As they are recent graduates they have a great idea as they sit close to their audience and use the advice of my friends and I who are still at university. I do not want to name them (due to their strategy) but they are following the path of building up a hugely powerful site and the strength amongst student users on an underground level before embarking on a PR campaign etc. They actually have a substantial student userbase, and their userbase is about repeat visits and usage of their vast site not just headline grabbing registered members. You will probably be hearing about them very soon I expect. Unlike other new sites eg. basedrift.com who have all the PR hype before they launch without the substance to back it up. The likes of Google, FB were all under the radar of consultants, press for a year or two before becoming widely known strong forces.
One last point there are also very clever unique ways of targeting the new students who join each year, which simply rely on a UCAS shootout, a la univillage, yougo. P.S. Over the last couple of days i have just asked over 30 university student friends (I am a univeristy DJ and have a wide net of student mated from across the country and they have not heard of yougo.
@John Weblin
Have you recovered? You wrote more than the original piece!
Some of the things you’ve said show you have some good insight into what you are talking about.
Univillage: I agree with much of what you say – it was pretty uninspiring. Though it wasn’t a complete Facebook clone; they did try to create something with an editorial mission, something Facebook steers clear of. There were interviews with politicians, live band showcases and they tried to give it personality. I believe it did get some decent initial registrations (co-incidentally using the UCAS database to market to if memory serves me right). They got curious students signed up, but they couldn’t keep them there. Most of them were already using a superior social network, either Facebook, MySpace or Bebo, and there was no desire for an exclusive student one of that nature.
Students do not share a common set of interests that differentiate them from everyone else, which is why you won’t find a copy of ‘Student’ magazine in WH Smiths that has a healthy share of the 2.2 million audience.
The social network part of yougo that works is something very specific. It’s all about the buzz around applying to uni, getting accepted and preparing to go. It’s the excitement, intrigue and anxiety that we often face before we step into the unknown. Once the known arrives in this context – when a young person becomes a uni student – then their need for the network falls away. Particularly since many of the interactions that take place on yougo are between people who don’t know each other – something that, to me, makes the site interesting and unlike Facebook.
My brief was to pick three sites or technologies that I thought were interesting in this sector. I’m not saying they are all destined for multidollar glory. You are right about Student Beans. It’s a good site and probably a good business. I would definitely use it to reach students. But there is nothing in its concept that makes it interesting to TechCrunch readers.
Sorry I didn’t mention your graduate mates, whoever they may be. It’s my job to keep in touch with what’s going on in this area, so I hope they drop me a line when they are ready.
Your assessment of Facebook penetration misses a key period. In the UK the initial registrations were from university students at Oxbridge, Durham, St Andrews etc. Basically the posh unis that had a lot of cross-Atlantic student movement going on with Harvard, Princeton etc. And yes, once Facebook opened registrations to non-students we saw the arrival of media people, leading eventually to mass penetration. But before they opened up they had already sewn up the majority of student audience, with over 70% of all UK students registered. I was working a lot within Facebook at that time and I can tell you there was not a university that didn’t have the majority of its students registered and active. Facebook is *definitely* widely adopted among students. There is a separate issue as to how many are active nowadays – there has been a big drop off in interest.
Group Spaces faces a big marketing challenge. I am interested in the site as something that sees a problem and solves it. The society culture at Oxford is stronger than elsewhere, but every union at every university co-ordinates societies and there is usually a handful at each uni that have massive memberships.
“Another thing that frustrates the founders of web startups, is these so called consultants who claim to know the youth market and charge companies for their expertise.”
Firstly, charging for expertise is the business model that has worked best for me. I have been known not to charge, but mostly I like to go with the charging thing because it keeps me from going hungry. The quality of my expertise is best judged by my clients and the results of my campaigns. I don’t really believe that there are dozens of start-up founders bemoaning the existence of youth market consultants. And I’m not sure why I have to have run something as successful as Bebo before I can help a client reach the student audience or discuss the marketplace. In fact I find the idea bizarre. I’ve been working in youth communications since around ’97. It’s a passionate interest and I’ve picked up some specialist knowledge over the years that has proved helpful to people. I am considering changing the title ‘consultant’ though, as it tends to trigger cliched associations.
With regards to the last post, there was no offence meant to be caused by the ‘consultant’ thing. After speaking to my friends (doing their site), they have had discussions/worked with a few consultants. The trend they have found is that they mostly used to work in PR, or for a media agency eg. Carat. and then set up on their own. Then they claim they know this, that and the other. However this is never the case and it seems they charge a high retainer on the basis that they used to be marketing manager at Nike etc. It’s kind of like the Apprentice when you get these high salaried brand consultants etc. and when it comes to doing the crunch of basic business, marketing etc. they get exposed. This was not meant to be directed at yourself but was a generalisation that many start-ups i have spoken to have found and you do seem to know your stuff.
Also, with regards to the FaceBook penetration issue. I actually helped my friends conduct their market research as they built their site throughout 2006. In Feb/March 2006 FB was only open to around 20 uni’s with some smaller obscure ones amongst the list like “Edghill” and the rest were the posh ones. During this time when helping my mates, their close uni friends and I went in and it used to show amounts of friends etc. so you could roughly work out their numbers which we did. Then once this became harder, we were manually counting the amount of students on there, how active they seemed to be. We were spending days on this (we were paid for this i might add and aren’t that sad). This continued until just after the exams, when around June FB opened up their full list (we even have their screen shots with date,s of their application pages which had the listed uni’s). There is no way that over a million students signed up between June (when all uni’s were allowed) and September (when FB opened up) for them to reach 70% of the student population (Especially during summer)
Also, more importantly my friends manually (probably the most effective market market research) went to over 50 campuses (cos they are mad) and spoke to numerous students asking them is FB big here, are you on it are your friends on it? And like i said apart from the top10 ‘posh’ unis the answers were “not big thing here, aint heard of it, or heard of it and not on it, or know a couple of people on it”. They also contacted the heads of uni societies, spoke to them by phone, and the response outside those 10 uni’s was the same. At that time quite a few students had heard of MySpace as 2006 was the year when MySpace was in its peak in terms of hype, with FB media hype in 2007. Also, looking inside a site something can appear bigger then it actually is, so I’ll probably have to disagree with you on this one.
This was all done because as my friends were launching a student specific site they wanted to know the market inside out and undertook a year preparation/build/research. Then the best thing that could have happened was when FB opened up and lost student exclusivity…………
My friends have manually contacted their student members from their site by phone (which other sites do that?) and the responses have been along the lines of they like the fact it is closed, private, niche, just for them, no old fogies on their etc. so as with student nights this shows that students will want their own space, in which they will find students with similar interests. They have even asked them once again about other sites they amy use and FB is no longer a concern for them (some of them have said its fake, too many **** on it etc.) Also, they gate hundreds of students from across the U.K signing up a day, with most (over 90%) becoming active users. In active we mean use of 2-3 times a week, not the usual technical definiton of an active user which is 1 visit/use a month. Why would this many students be joining (through word of mouth) if FB had such a reach. So your point of drop off (Although disagree from what level this has dropped off) is correct.
They will get in touch with you soon and already know about your work, blog etc. they have said but they want to cement their position first (so can’t be replicated easily etc.) implement some new key features and get ready for new term first, when they will be building on extensive growing userbase (organically growing with hundreds of new students joining up every day even throughout summer) whereas last year they had no name in market place. By the end of the forthcoming academic year I am pretty confident they will have the student market (not every single on obviously) locked in to their site.