Gather.com: Social Networking Grows Up

The year-old site is trying to create an online space for the NPR crowd. But do they have time—amid kids and careers—to hang out online?

by Sarah Lacy

Bill Kling was thinking about social networks since long before MySpace became all the online rage. In fact, he was doing it before the first Internet bubble crashed—some five years before phrases like "user-generated content" and "Web 2.0" would dominate the news and Silicon Valley cocktail party chatter.

Kling is president of American Public Media Group, one of the largest producers and distributors of public radio programming. From early on, he's been stunned at how many listeners take the time to write letters to the show. "We discovered there is someone—usually many people—who know more about any subject we broadcast than we do," he says. What's more, they seemed to be yearning for a way to interact with the stations, not just passively listen to the radio.

In April, 2000, he huddled with some Silicon Valley venture capitalists to figure out how to bring all those smart listeners together in an online network—though he didn't have a name for it at the time. Then the Nasdaq (NDAQ) crashed, and the idea shifted to the back burner—where it simmered.

Adult Society Online

But the idea stuck with Kling. And as he got to know listeners better, he became more convinced they often had more in common with each other than many of the people they knew in disparate and typically suburban pockets around the U.S. For one, they often fit the typical public radio demographic: over 35, highly educated, and keenly interested in the political and cultural world around them.

Today, he finally has his social network, Gather.com. Look at the site's front page and you'll see middle-America feel-good topics such as "craft ideas for the weekend," but also weightier topics like state-by-state discussions about whether the Democrats can win back Congress. Then there are chat rooms that range from spirituality to food and wine.

Based in Boston and started by former e-mail marketing entrepreneur Tom Gerace, Gather.com is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary, with American Public Media Group as a key investor and supporter. Gerace boasts about the site's new blue-chip advertisers like Volvo and Starbucks (SBUX) and rising traffic. Rising maybe, but not exactly taking the Web by storm. According to comScore, it had just 77,000 unique visitors as of September, 2006. Compare that with the 173 million for MySpace and you get a sense of the conundrum facing Gather: Do grownups really want a place to hang online?

Appealing to Life's Next Phase

The 35-and-over demographic may be increasingly Web savvy, but between careers, kids, spouses, and aging parents, most don't have time to lurk online the way teens and young adults do. When they're online, they'd rather focus on something specific, like careers, kids, or even knitting or dogs. As they get older, they spend more time on sites focused on such matters as health and aging (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/25/06, "Boomers: A Web-Marketing Bonanza").

Consider the largest site focused on this demographic, LinkedIn. It doesn't have chat rooms or message boards; personal profiles don't even include photos. It's focused on helping people network and get further in their careers. "The key thing is plugging into something they care about," says LinkedIn Chief Executive Reid Hoffman. "People log into Facebook six times a day because the thing they care most about is hooking up with people. For someone older, that ain't their thing. You have to appeal to something in the next phase of life."