One year ago, we published a couple of posts on Fanpop, a Web 2.0 startup with a focus on sharing and commenting on links. A lot has happened over at Fanpop since then: It’s not all about links anymore, there are videos, articles, polls and more.

And while the most obvious perk a year ago was sharing links on your favorite topic, today Fanpop is a community, a social networking site with a warm and safe feel to it.

The evolution of Fanpop

When Fanpop was quite new, we had a talk with Dave Lu, who labels himself business guy and HTML monkey at Fanpop. At the time he said:

“We feel like we’re pretty unique from the folksonomy sites in that most of them are strictly bookmarking sites with tags. We actually want to build community-driven portals that include forums and other targeted content like RSS feeds from relevant sources.” And now they have.

Dave comments on the evolution of Fanpop: “What was started as essentially a niche topical social bookmarking site has developed into a site focused on the passions of the community. We are now fostering interaction and content sharing among fandoms. So now if you have fan art you’d like to share or an opinion you’d like to voice, you can immediately find an audience of fellow fanatics who appreciate and understand it.”

I find the new and improved Fanpop quite addictive and I would like to know to what Dave attributes this new atmosphere:

“Since then we’ve redesigned the site and added a ton of new features including videos, image galleries, polls (picks), article publishing (soapbox), props, and more,” he explains. “I think the combination of the new focus of the redesign and feature set with the growing number of core users hitting a tipping point caused the site to become a thriving and vibrant community that loves to share content and interact.”

New features

The new features make a huge diference. Originally, the main form of contribution was contributing links, rating links and commenting on links. There was an opportunity to start and contribute in forum discussions, but this never caught on.

Now, for each topic (each ‘fan spot’ in Fanpop lingo), there are a number of options. In addition to the link part, which is still the back bone of many spots, you can add videos and images.

You can also add articles, called Soap Boxes. These are surprisingly often of good quality. The ones that are not become invisible quickly, because users rate the articles and the best float to the top. Other users are free to comment on your article, and the most engaging Sop Box article s turn into lively conversations.

Another poular feature are Fan Picks, polls that anyone can set up or take part in. Again, you can add comments to any pick you participate in, and the most popoular and/or controversial picks can stay active for weeks and spawn interesting debates.

And according to Dave, more features are in the pipeline.

The fans

Fanpop users, called fans, are growing in number and this is a central success factor. With 2,000,000+ monthly visits and 12,000,000+ monthly pageviews, something is always happening — there is always fresh content, new users and new potentioal friends.

The Fanpop users are a young crowd: 62% are between the ages of 12-24. If you think this makes for a juvenile or reckless tone, think again. Fanpop seems to be a safe place where the users look out for each other and their sense of community is great. Here are some statements from the fans:

“The small things count. A large amount of fans do add things, they do rate things, but most of all, they seem to like the community. So please remember, it doesn’t take much just to say hi, it doesn’t take much to rate someone’s content (which will in turn get them that medal they have been after for so long), it doesn’t take much to comment, to start a discussion, to get to know people, even saying thankyou or sorry when an argument arises. Fanpop is a community, and a bloody good one at that.” — Benji

“I’ve reallly seen a community grow up from a few power users to a whole slew of major contributers. I can seriously say the highlight of my day is when I log in and see all these updates to spots that I’m a fan of. I’m crazy about Fanpop. I’ve sipped the purple kool-aid and it tastes good! Thank you everyone for making this place such a wonderful place to hang out!” — johnminh

What’s next

What Fanpop has to decide on, however, is whether the site should remain a forum for young people or whether it should aim at conquering the older age cohorts. There is nothing wrong in attracting one particluar age group. As a matter of fact, it may be an advantage, as we know of some teenagers and tweenagers that would not like to hang out with what they feel are ‘old people’ online.

On the other hand, Facebook has demonstrated the enormous business potential that the ‘older’ generations can represent.

There is another aspect of Facebook, MySpace and the like, that the people over at Fanpop might consider as well, and that is a more personalizable profile page. Users who come to Fanpop from other social networking sites might expect this.

However, the main focus of Fanpop is the topic spots, not the profile page of those taking part. In a recent poll asking “Would you like your fanpop profile to be able to show & tell more about u?” the yes vote only has a slight lead. One user explains: “No, cuz this isnt myspace!!”

There is a personal profile page and other might visit it, but it lacks the many features found at e.g. Facebook, including the possibility of adding various applications. Even if Fanpop dicides to stay with the young crowd, following Facebook’s open standard and allowing applications to be developed might be an idea. Dave has this to say on the subject:

“There are no current plans to open Fanpop up as a platform for developers at this time. We’re too busy building all these cool features ourselves! We want to stay focused on building a close-knit community and a lot of applications might distract from that at this stage. We are strategically building feature sets to promote and foster interaction among the communities of fans with one another.”

And he adds: “Facebook was built as a social network of connected individual profiles and is leveraging the F8 developer community to build features and applications to help their users socialize with one another beyond messaging. Fanpop was designed with a focus on the community and the social interaction among the fans in mind.”

Fanpop app for Facebook

There are plans for a Fanpop app for Facebook, though:

“We know that we have differentiated ourselves from what Facebook does with our focus on content and would never want to change that. Our main goal with the Facebook app would be two-fold,” Dave explains.

“We want to use it as an outreach and marketing platform to get more exposure for Fanpop. And we also want to leverage the Facebook community to create and add more content to Fanpop via an app. We’re currently looking at a few different options. We realize that there’s currently a lot of noise with the apps, and are very focused on building out Fanpop before we shift our resources to any app of our own.

Fanpop and search engine marketing

Fanpop uses the nofollow tag. Google argues that it will not take such links into consideration when calculatiing a web page’s page rank. From a link building perspective this is a serious drawback. The Fanpop founders are using such “link condoms” consciously in order to discourage spammers. That tactic seems to work.

That being said, Fanpop may still be used for Internet marketing. The submission of relevant, on-topic, high quality links are applauded. There is no editorial filter apart from the votes of Fanpop users, and links in high traffic sport may immediately bring you visitors. Like in other social web communities, becoming an active authority will bring you fans that will show an interest in what you are doing, also on other sites.

But obviously, your contributions should be of interest to the younger age groups. We guess that the most efficient way of using Fanpop is by developing original video content, particularly with a humoros slant. Any video added to YouTube can be added to Fanpop in 15 seconds.

Fanpop
The Fanpop blog
Pandia’s review of Fanpop from August 2006
Pandia’s interview with Dave Lu from October 2006