You’d be forgiven for assuming that The Sun’s new web community feature ‘MySun’ is based on sister News Corp site MySpace. Actually, the name is from the kind of London geezer phrase “go on my son”, which is an appropriate pun for the red top. But a social net it definitely is not; it does not invite users to link to each other and user profiles can’t be searched, amongst other things. We know that community is now in the centre of any right-thinking media organisation and that’s the goal of this feature. The idea was first mooted in August last year and was built in four months by the agencies Ioko and Splendid. There’s a team of six working moderating the site in-house and it’s all free to use, though registration is required. “What this will do for us is create stickiness,” said Pete Picton, site editor. “Readers have to register if they want to comment and once that happens, it creates loyalty - and that’s better for selling adverts and for creating revenue.” It will be interesting to see how The Sun monetises this feature as it builds traffic - specifically how it fits with the site’s local classified service that launched in July. “It’s a perfect fit for Sun Local, but at the moment MySun is a new toy to play with.” The Sun has traditionally invited readers to contribute to the paper through features like Give Us a yell and You The Jury, so the web makes it much easier to invite user contributions. The site was opened to public users on 11 October and though Picton wouldn’t give user numbers, he said he’s pleased with traffic so far. thesun.co.uk is now up to 6.9 million uniques, as of September.
—Sun Online introduces How To videos: The site has partnered with VideoJug.com to publish 10 How To videos each week on everything from giving up smoking to eating sushi. These are not user generated videos but professionally produced films that users and rate and review. The Sun is expected to monetise the feature through sponsorship and related ads.
Related: UK Newspaper Sun Quietly Launches MySun Community Site