Add HotSoup to the Dead Pool?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 9th, 2007 11:01 pm 
I was wrong about HotSoup. It’s failing for different reasons than I thought it would.
Full disclosure: I had discussions with members of the HotSoup team before launch and I have enormous respect for many of those involved in the project.
But FishbowlDC hits on the nub of the problem. It’s traffic has flatlined. Not flatlined growth. But literally hovering near zero on the Alexa charts. That about mirrors my experience, as I last checked it out a month or so after its fall launch.
Its mission was both high-minded and potentially lucrative: social networking for influentials. My initial thought was this: “That’s nice. But wait they’ll they find out that most political influentials aren’t civic-minded moderates but committed righties and lefties. Watch one side completely overrun the place and drive the other side out, a la Newsvine.”
In the end, the site was not architected nearly as well as Newsvine, so they never attracted a big audience and got to have this problem. I would ascribe the proximate cause of death to three factors:
1) A contrived mission. HotSoup doesn’t give people what they want, but what some political muckety-mucks think they should have: rarefied conversation between right and left on the issues of the day. (Ummm…. no thanks.) Leaving aside the worthwhile goal of civic discourse, “leading” the public without wowing them first is no way to build a business.
2) People really don’t care what celebrities think. Front and center on HotSoup are commentaries from establishment politicians and business leaders. More often than not, these commentaries are nothing more than the stale conventional wisdom of the day. Content aside, celebrity posts often have a credibility issue, as people automatically assume some staffer wrote or crafted them. This is the case even when the statements are videod, but inexplicably HotSoup puts the text out there before the video.
HotSoup proves that boring content from interesting people won’t drive traffic (as if this point need proving). Huffington Post, which started out with vomit-inducing posts from the likes of John Cusack and Quincy Jones, has since moved towards providing a ton of content from B-list lefties, a much more viable model. Likewise, the Politico succeeds because its mission is simple: producing great content.
2) It’s a glorified forum, only more complicated. The HotSoup people tried reinventing the forum, and bungled it. On HotSoup, anyone can open their own discussion “loop” under which new threads can be started. The result is that no one can find your discussion thread, because it’s not anchored under anything permanent, just a “loop” someone started on a whim. If someone starts two loops about the same thing, good luck tying the two together. Some grounding in predefined topics or categories would help — that’s what’s called a forum. And HotSoup couldn’t just be another forum, so…
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Tagged: hotsoup 
social networking
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