Guy Hibbert is CEO of Sift <http://www.sift.co.uk/>,
a British online community consulting and technology firm active in a
number of countries. We asked his opinion of the online community
sector from his vantage point in Bristol, England.
Say a few words about Sift, your clients, technologies and growth.
Sift was set up 5 years ago with the launch of our first online community AccountingWEB. Over those 5 years AccountingWEB has grown to a worldwide membership of 140,000 accounting professionals and Sift has developed another eight B2B online communities, collectively totaling a membership of well in excess of 250,000. In response to market demand we launched our SiftGroups product in late 2000, offering an outsourced community technology and services solution to third parties and launched our first three client sites within three months. Nine months later we are working on our eighth client site and our client list includes; Quantum Business Media, a business publisher; the UK National Health Service, the European Commission and the new London based consumer community Square Canary. We now have 95 staff and offices in Bristol, Edinburgh and Indianapolis.
Which technologies or applications are most popular with clients?
SiftGroups is our key product but it’s highly versatile and adaptable depending on the requirements of our clients. The product consists of both consultancy services including community management, marketing and advertising sales based on our 5 years experience of building successful communities; and our community technology which consists of over 30 content, community and commerce modules. Our most popular module by far is our content management system. It’s the key to maintaining and managing content as well as saving significant time and effort for our clients.
How do you make money? How is business?
There are two sides to the Sift business, SiftMedia and SiftGroups. SiftMedia includes Sift owned and managed communities such as AccountingWEB, TrainingZONE and LawZone. We generate revenue from these largely through online advertising sales and e-commerce, both with partner suppliers and though pay-per-view content sales. Business is very
strong for our communities especially considering the nature on the advertising market as a whole in the UK at the moment, especially online advertising. Just to give you an idea, advertising sales from the first half of this year are up 380% on our sales from the first half of last year; we look forward to making our comparisons at the end of this year.
The other side is SiftGroups, our outsourced community solution. We make our money simply through offering our technology and expertise to clients on an ASP basis. This is a new area for us but the first nine months have been a strong start with over $1 million in committed revenues, our client list is growing in size and breadth and we’re confident for the next nine months.
How would you describe the online community space in Europe? What areas are of interest? Which large players are doing interesting work?
Community is becoming more widely understood in Europe and is being used in more and more areas of business. The most recent area where community is being embraced is in large
Corporates and HR departments where ‘B2E community’ is the latest buzz word. Employers are
realizing the benefits of Communities for knowledge exchange, informal collaboration and management and staff communications.
Europe is a few steps further along in wireless technologies than the US.
Are you seeing interesting online community technologies using wireless?
To be honest we don’t have any experience of wireless online communities and although there has been huge investment in wireless technology and
applications in Europe we haven’t seen it filtering into the online community space yet. This may change.
What trends over the next two years or so are most interesting?
We are starting to see wider awareness of the role online communities can play in employee knowledge exchange and customer communications programmes for corporates. We are conducting research to try to quantify more precisely where the market is – our belief is that this is still “the early market” and that wider adoption will occur as corporates position online community alongside intranets, corporate portals, knowledge management and e-learning as a key product that saves money and adds real value to a variety of information, knowledge management and CRM initiatives.
Another trend which will have a bearing on our SiftMedia business is the consistent underlying growth in B2B internet usage and the associated increases in advertising expenditure. In spite of the difficult prevailing market conditions our own advertising yields and revenues have held up well and we are confident of strong future growth as general internet site usage increases.
