Affinity portals are trying to commercialize association ties. Association members stick to their special interests. They may look like consumer markets, but don't act that way.
The premise id iBelon.com is that affinity groups - unions, professional associations, alumni groups, - can extend the affiliation of their members into many regions of personal and social life. Joe and Harry are members of the Teamsters. Therefore, there are likely to select teamster- oriented news, teamster touted apparel or white goods, Teamster authorized travel and vacation spots - a veritable Teamster Weltenschaung. The Journal reports that iBelong has rolled out 41 portals for membership organizations, including the Teamsters and twelve other unions. For $12 a month, iBelong accesses members to its parallel portal and provides tailored news, financial information, shopping, advertising, chat areas and other services. It carries the cost of marketing these sites to the membership and retains 75% of accrued revenues, returning 25% to the sponsoring organization. The company has already reported that "roughly 20% of those who visit the shopping area buy something". iBelong is aiming to own and manage portal sites for hundreds of organizations with memberships of 100,000 or more. iBelong is in company with Mywa.com, Mypersona.com, and iPlane.com in building community markets on the Internet. Will it work? The first question to ask is why the organized associations themselves don't extend their offerings to members. Why don't they offer to their members what iBelong is proposing to do for them? If these are captive markets for commerce, why should the associations give away their margins? Why contract with a surrogate web site like iBelong's teamsterworkingfamilie.com rather than meet member captive needs directly. In fact many organizations do this for what they consider collateral needs. ASTD has a shopping cart for books on training. The ABA has special travel and hotel offers for members attending their meetings and conventions. But they do not sell computers, soccer balls, or dinnerware. They do not provide daily weather reports or stock quotes. If associations won't extend their offerings on their own web sites, why does iBelong propose to build an empire of affinity portals? It may be because iBelong has greater confidence in the influence of affinity on life style. Or because it can enjoy benefits of scale in providing expanded offering on many portals. But these factors are contradictory. Affinity should influence life style purchases in direct proportion that selection is tailored to the specific contours of the affinity. And if this is the case, there are no scale savings to the endless process of specialization. Associations do not expand their offerings beyond collateral services because they know that their members are dedicated only to core special interests, not to homogeneous lifestyles. While they support special interest legislation, annual meetings, and training workshops, they do not favor the same airlines, computers, or vacation spots. Like all Americans, their market decisions are driven by market factors, like prices and brands, not ideology. Let us grant that a small percentage of any association membership is single minded and would ardently see the world from an association point of view. These few would oblige iBelong and pay $12 a month to shop through teamstersworkingfamilie.com, rather than shop through AOL, amazon, or Yahoo. The cost of tailoring and fitting news, goods and services, travel and healthcare preferences for a dedicated subset of unionists and professionals would be prohibitive. Consider the management skills and costs of satisfying the fractious and argumentative tendencies of truly dedicated followers. No leader is good enough. No hotel has the correct ambience. No airline cabin crew has the right attitude. A better business model for iBelong and its peers in the affinity space is to supply generic shopping carts, travel planning and other commercial services to association web sites on a content management basis. In this manner the associations can extend their offerings as conveniences to their members and visitors. This will spare iBelong a futile and fatal search for idealistic life styles in a country that is still a mass culture, dead set against separatism. While every American seeks something very special, they generally come from different backgrounds and affiliations. The concept of Internet community needs careful probing. Community is not the same thing as affinity. MK
