Rushmore Drive: Vertical Search and Community For African Americans

African Americans are definitely underserved online. With 15% of the US population, there should be at least a dozen large sites with content either tailored specifically to African Americans or where African Americans play a huge role in content and format. There aren't.

It's just bad business not to serve this large and growing audience. Businesses that serve African Americans well PROSPER. Ask Revlon, CoverGirl, Procter, Ford, State Farm, Unilever, Red Lobster, McDonalds, Coca cola, Zales, etc. When you ask them, they will tell you that African Americans are an amazing source of business, more brand loyal than the US average, and willing to spend for quality. Sounds good, yes?

One major initiative to increase the tailored content for African Americans is Rushmore Drive, a business that is part of the massive IAC portfolio. Having IAC involved is great news, I think, for several reasons:

1. It indicates the importance of the African American audience, so that other media majors get involved. And let's face it, having media majors involved is essential given the concentration of media power in only a few companies' hands.

2. It ensures that the project has the seed money necessary to create a truly powerful community.

3. It may help convince more advertisers to actively seek out African American consumers online. Which in turn leads to products and services especially geared to African American wants and needs.

The site itself is pretty fascinating, because it offers a blend of mainstream and African American content in a single venue, reflecting the needs of a variety of ages and lifestyles as well as the reality that no subculture is an island -- that some mainstream content is relevant to everyone. Duh.

This blended approach is valuable because it means that the typical online pattern of siloing minority oriented content into specialty sites and areas need not be the basis of future web development. Much minority media online -- be it for African Americans, Latinos, GLBT, Chinese Americans, etc. -- provides a service but ultimately appeals to a smaller range of advertisers that actively court that particular group. It says, well there are travelers, and gay travelers, for example. Even though a lot more gay people visit Yellowstone every year than take an RSVP cruise. Niched out minority media is fine, it's better than nothing, but it creates an advertising Balkans. Which is just dumb.

OK, so now the aging white male blogger will now get off his analytical soapbox and let Rushmore Drive explain itself.



I chunk their content into four categories: news, views, community, and jobs. The focus on news and jobs helps drive strong CPMs, while community and views help drive stickiness and revisit.

The site is still in early stages -- traffic has been wildly up and down and up again, as happens with many new web sites as particularly viral pieces of content drive temporary changes in the daily figures. Since mid July some of that noise seems to have abated and the site finds itself on a slow upward trajectory. It appears to be a soft launch as it is featuring mostly house ads rather than charter advertisers.

This is a site to watch. I really hope it works so that the web does a bit better job serving the large and important African American community. Because serving African Americans excellently online is a great business decision.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.