How Liveleak Built a Community
Co-Founder Hayden Hewitt Offers Tips on How to Build a Community Online
While there’s no one right way to launch a website and convince people to return, sometimes the secret is doing as little as possible. That’s certainly been the case for the video site Liveleak, which at four million monthly visitors, has slowly grown into one of the largest video sites on the Internet since its launch in 2006.
Liveleak initially rose to prominence as a hub for footage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American and British news agencies were not providing much video coverage of the conflicts, and so Liveleak filled that need for news viewers around the world. But lately it’s building its reputation as a repository of weird, crude curiosities: overflowing toilets; monkeys riding dogs herding sheep; bachelor parties with spectacularly bad behavior.
It’s a move that is working, and those who visit tend to stick around. Alexa data shows the average visit to Liveleak lasts nearly eight minutes, twice as long as the average visit to Vimeo or the New York Times. But what’s most surprising about this growth is its sources (or lack thereof). Just 23,000 sites link in to Liveleak, compared to the more than 528,000 that link to Vimeo or the 2.3 million linking to YouTube.
Just 23,000 sites link in to Liveleak, compared to the more than 528,000 that link to Vimeo or the 2.3 million linking to YouTube.
To get a sense of how Liveleak’s grown into this new shape, Internet Week’s Max Willens spoke with Liveleak Co-Founder Hayden Hewitt about his approach to fostering community on the site, and came away with these tips.
1. Don’t Force Anything
“Never try to force your community in one direction, ever,” Hewitt said. “You don’t manage them, you service them.” As Hewitt and the rest of the site’s developers have worked to expand Liveleak’s features, they’ve met with resistance at every turn. Though the team does its best to take every complaint seriously, they also accept that it’s impossible to please everybody. “It will never be right for everybody,” Hewitt says. “If you gave them gold coins, they would say they are the wrong kind of gold coins.”
2. Complaints Are Good (Most of the Time)
While some community managers find that kind of energy exasperating, Hewitt sees it as a good sign. “It means they’ve invested in something,” he says.
3. Embrace Diversity Whenever Possible
Unlike most sites that traffic in social and politically charged material, Liveleak has managed to draw a diverse array of visitors. “We seem to attract people from both sides of any given argument,” Hewitt says. Though that results in plenty of arguments between users, the fact that there are folks from the left and the right on the site is taken as a given, and nobody’s dissuaded from participating. “If you have a website where everybody’s pulling in the same direction, that’s just less interesting.”
“If you have a website where everybody’s pulling in the same direction, that’s just less interesting.”
4. Let Volunteers Help
Throughout its existence, Liveleak’s stayed committed to its independence. Though Hewitt says the founders have received offers of venture capital and even a few buyout opportunities, they’ve resisted. They’ve also stayed in the black by relying on teams of volunteers, who do a little bit of everything for the site. “Without them,” Hewitt says, “we’d be screwed.”
