The Mega Niche?
Together with VIBE and MySpace we made an announcement today about VIBE Verses 3, the rap battle to end all rap battles. For those of you who have been following the VIBE Verses franchise, you’ll be very familiar with the contest to find the ‘next great rapper.’ What’s new and exciting with 3 is that the winner will be picked by Wyclef Jean to open for him during his MySpace Release Party on December 4th in LA (the finalists will be selected by the VIBE Verses community).
Wyclef Jean is looking for an opening act, is it YOU?
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Pretty awesome, huh?!
What’s really interesting about all this is that this is the first major collaboration between a MEGA community, like MySpace, and a niche community, in this case the leading hip hop and urban lifestyle brand. There’s been a lot of buzz about OpenSocial lately (something we think is great for the industry) and it’s easy to miss the fact that from a business perspective, tremendous opportunities exist when the worlds of mega and niche start to intermingle.
A big part of making an online community successful are the non-technical building blocks (we’ll take care of the technical for you :-)), such as marketing/promotion and programming/editorial. You’ve got to give people a reason to come to the site and participate in the community and you’ve got to find and tell people about what’s going on in the community. VIBE and MySpace are a perfect example of two leaders coming together to make all of this happen.
The VIBE Verses community is a very engaged and active niche community. They gather around the contest (a great piece of programming). Its success is measured not just by traffic but by the levels of engagement, i.e. the richness of the profiles people have created, and the comments people leave after watching a video, voting, etc.
MySpace, the world’s largest social network, with over 72 million unique visitors in October 2007 according to comScore, acts as an audience aggregator. The Hip Hop channel on MySpace is one of the largest on its site. For MySpace to be associated with VIBE brings it a lot of ‘cred’ (so to speak) in this space.
Together, you have the makings of a ton of opportunities for both in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenue online but also offline events (i.e. concerts, parties, etc.), a big part of a publisher’s business model (VIBE puts on over 300 events around the country each year).
I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to see more ‘intermingling,’ whether it’s Facebook apps, OpenSocial or relationships like this. Are you ready for it? If so, head over to VIBE Verses and upload your video.
