Monday, August 14, 2000		Article

Flashy .edu Web sites with a touch of .com
By Steve Outing

COLLEGE students are among the most wired of all groups. On many US campuses, 100 per cent of students (and faculty staff) have Net access - if not via their own PCs, then through campus computer labs and libraries. Online penetration in universities far exceeds that of the general US population.

Yet Web sites serving campuses have, until recently, been pretty dull. Sites run by colleges themselves - featuring class descriptions, student directories, etc - have been largely utilitarian, lacking the interest of commercial sites.

The Web sites of campus newspapers, meanwhile, have offered little more than "shovelware" - articles and content copied from the print edition. It is a rare college newspaper that has the resources to be at the leading edge of online publishing.

This is all changing. American colleges are getting flashy Web sites featuring the latest in Internet technology, as the dot.com industry figures out ways to "monetise" students by creating local Web sites to serve them. Three types of site are emerging to serve individual college and university campuses:

1) The campus newspaper's portal: While many Internet-savvy journalism students would no doubt love to build state-of-the-art online newspapers, a simple lack of resources has prevented this on most campuses. But Campus-Engine.com, a California-based company, is riding to the rescue with a plan to turn campus newspaper Web sites into local "portal" sites, leveraging the content of local papers and adding slick new features and services.

All this costs the newspapers nothing upfront - just a negotiated share of advertising revenues brought into the campus portal. CampusEngine's strategy is to sell national advertising to an aggregated audience of students. CEO Jack Crawford says that the campus-paper deals represent a reach of 1.5m students so far.

2) The school-sponsored commercial portal: The competition for the campus-newspaper portals will come from school-run portal sites operated by commercial entities on the schools' behalf. Typical of this model is a new company called zUniversity.com, based in Connecticut. zUniversity creates commercial campus portal sites that are affiliated with the schools. In effect, they become the commercial arm of the public institutions.

Where typical .edu Web sites are basically intranets serving staff and students, the zUniversity sites can provide a variety of services - entertainment listings, or online ticketing for off-campus events. Schools retain their .edu sites, but users are referred to the zUniversity portal for commercial services.

While "z" sites have the school partners as sources of official news and information, they don't have the advantage of a student newspaper, which generates local news and event listings (most US college newspapers are independent of the school administration). zUniversity operates a small "field operation" on each affiliate campus, with an editorial correspondent and interns providing local content for the portal site.

zUniversity is also aiming its sites at ex-students. By affiliating with alumni associations as well as the schools themselves, it hopes to keep its users coming back for life. And, like CampusEngine, zUniversity aims to make much of its money from selling national advertising across its network of college sites. (zUniversity's CEO was a founder of web advertising titan Doubleclick.)

3) Taking .edu sites to the next level. The final category involves taking the existing .edu website, supercharging it with the latest technology, and paying for it with advertising. This approach is represented by companies like Campus Pipeline. The Campus Pipeline platform integrates with a school's databases, providing web features such as Online registration for classes, web-based e-mail, and online academic results.

One hitch in this model is that these handy hi-tech features don't come cheap. Currently, schools are either paying for the technology themselves, or allowing advertising on their Web sites to pay for it - which doesn't always sit well with academic constituencies.

For students, all this campus web activity means a lot of online choice. Not only are .edu sites improving the services they provide, but commercial entities are offering a tremendous amount of local content and services.

Students are going from the digital dregs to a digital cornucopia as .edu joins forces with .com.

— By arrangement with
The Guardian