Vibe Capital, the company behind the parenting advice site Minti which we covered earlier has announced the public launch of their latest vertical advice site Refurber.
Refurber is described as “a social and reference website for anyone passionate about renovations, DIY, landscaping, design and anything related to home improvement. Members can share and gain valuable advice on a wide range of home improvement related topics.”
Overall the site is well designed and offers everything one would expect of a modern day vertical community site. I am surprised however that Vibe have not decided to leverage their existing vertical-community Minti. For example why should I have to register again with Refurber? A single login would seem a logical starting point for attracting existing users from Minti and a valuable asset later in integrating/centralising some of the services that are shared across communities.
It seems that Vibe have taken an old web – ‘walled garden’ approach and although this may work in the near term, eventually many users may tire of managing half a dozen profiles when open platforms like Facebook can offer them a broader more centralised service.
There is no doubt that vertical communities are an attractive proposition for advertising. Advertisements can be targeted for users much more effectively than in a broader social network and therefore can provide a higher return per user. The trade-off however is that creating new communities isn’t a particularly easy thing to do and the team at Vibe Capital will have their work cut out for them as they attempt to replicate the success of Minti.
TechMate 