PointCast is about to make a move onto campus. Looking to grow beyond the corporate market with its screensaver-cum-information network, the company will target college students with its PointCast College Network, starting this fall.
But while professionals may spend all day sitting in front of their computers, the question of whether students exhibit the same behavior has yet to be resolved.
The potential audience is large. There are 14 million students in the United States, and according to Strategic Marketing Communications' yearly survey, more than 83 percent access the Web. More than a third of those students log on daily or twice daily. Top activities range from email and chat, to research and applying for jobs.
"Business professionals are near their computers all the time. We looked at other markets similar to that and saw that colleges are very wired," says project coordinator Michelle Yee, who surveyed 400 students on their Net habits. "Usage time is pretty high, and there's a high port-to-pillow ratio. The statistics all say that 60 percent own a computer and the infrastructure is there."
According to the SMC study, at least 60 percent of all college students live off-campus, and likely have only one phone line. But PointCast figures that those students will also use networked campus computers; additionally, it's counting on the fact that more and more on-campus students now have direct Ethernet connections to their dorm rooms and leave their computers on all day. Kate Delhagen of Forrester Research's 1996 study of the college market suggests that 60 percent of all on-campus students now have direct T1 access, as universities "roll the wire right to the pillow." While the corporate version of PointCast has 1.2 million subscribers a month, PointCast is promising a more conservative 125,000 monthly visitors for the launch of the College Network.
The PointCast College Network will include PointCast's normal channels, plus five extras - U-Wire from MainQuad, with stories from 110 college newspapers; The Music Zone, with news and chats from Billboard, Rolling Stone, and SonicNet; The Wired Escape Channel, which includes Wired News; an entertainment area from E Online; and a resource section ranging from academic research information to finance tips. Additionally, PointCast will supply free I-Servers to subscribing colleges across the country, and will help colleges create university-specific channels
Currently, the online market for college content is fragmented - a large number of Web sites are going after students, but Time Warner and other large media companies have mostly stayed away. Instead, smaller players like MainQuad, T@p, and Tripod have the most popular entertainment and magazine sites, along with informational sites such as Princeton Review. While those sites appear to be popular - MainQuad claims 25 thousand visitors a day, T@p Online claims 600,000 to 1 million a month - getting advertising has proven more difficult.
So far, "Large companies haven't had great success because it's such a quirky market," says Mason Meyers, president of MainQuad, who hopes that the PointCast deal will help MainQuad dominate the Web market as well. "Students are very savvy about the marketing they see and consume; they're very skeptical. If it's not straightforward and honest, they're turned off."
