Comments On Which Way Should I Go

Thank you all for commenting and emailing about how you think Ypulse should expand. The good news is, I could ultimately do all three. My gut is telling me to launch a Ypulse focusing on college students first with international expansion second. I know there is demand for a kids/tween version of Ypulse, but I think that would come later. I feel like these two offerings would attract more readers and sponsors than going even more vertical to wireless or fashion where there is a lot of competition in the blogosphere. I had a variety of responses and wanted to share them with you:

Aprille wrote: "I think International would be huge - every once in a while I dig up studies on Korea or Japan, but there just isn't enough WW coverage of youth issues. Europe, Brazil, Scandinavia, Africa, India, China (and Korea, Japan, Australia) - I think there'd be fascinating stuff there."

Hilary wrote: "To me, it makes the most sense to segment by age. Our current customer focus is supposed to be by customer types, not by products. That way we know who our customers are and what makes sense for them, rather than trying to shove them into boxes that we defined. The properties themselves can decide what they are interested in and how to work with the different age groups."

Ann wrote: "My vote would be to segment vertically instead of by age. The primary reason is that if you're marketing to a particular segment - say beauty products — it's important to know what the trends are across the age demographic. What's being done by college students tends to trickle down eventually to tweens."

Kent wrote: I would recommend segmenting your blog by age. I am currently in the middle of surveying my blog readers, and one request this morning was for more information about kids and kid culture. It seems like teens get a lot of attention, but kids and college students are two age groups that marketers and organizations want to learn much more about.

LK wrote: "A Focus on College Marketing (18-26) would be extremely helpful for me! Also, in regards to international blogging, we have an international 'Style Squad' that we put together through our Licensing Division to gather informations on styles, trends and music in territories that we have a strong presence. We found that when you nominate people to be part of something like this it makes them feel 'special' (for lack of a better word) and they actually participate. We only do this once a quarter but it is extremely useful. Maybe you could start by just having a special feature on your blogs that is the 'imports' section and features an international trend once a week. If people love it, then you can expand on that…just thinking out loud here!"

Kelvin wrote: "In my opinion (given three choices), I think going in the direction of age segments. It would be easier for everyone go to the the blog that fits their age group. This Fall I will be a college freshmen at the University of Memphis, so I would want to read the blog about college students. You can combined choices 2 & 3 into one."

Eric wrote: "A blog about how fashion is marketed could be fun, since you could have creative print ads (and TV ads if they're at YouTube) and commentary below."

Abigail wrote: "I would like to see sorted by age. If you went by category I'd worry more about missing something — I need to know things across the board for my kids in their age group."

Ibrahim wrote: "I think you should do #3, because for one reason you already cover 1 and 2 almost daily."

Stefan wrote: "Just to round the opinions out I'd love you to Expand internationally. A lot of trends come from abroad and I'd love to know about them even earlier."

DK wrote: "Why dissect your offering? Will it strengthen your brand or dilute it? I think the latter but who am I ;-) If you had to create a network my feeling is for the vertical segmentation - the other two will polarise and muddy you focus as too many issues cross ages/geographic boundaries…Or you could just use tags and categorise your posts out like that?"

Paul wrote: "Being one of the nasty people who said they would blog regulary but could never keep it going, I would refrain from suggesting number 3…ahem. Personally, I really like the vertical approach, if you look at your target market, they should generally be in the business of selling stuff to kids in one way or another (sneakers, websites, god, etc) and therefore dedicating feeds to the main youth sectors should prove popular."

Xen wrote: I would go with no 2 or 3. Dividing your audience is being too specific when your audience is much more generalized. Plus, the teen-age has some kind of glamour…

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