By NYU Staff

While online communities are no longer new, virtual communities on a news site is still under experiment.

Mega news sites such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and CNBC.com have created their own versions of online communities that are testing the waters. The motive? Engage readers, offer interactivity and, therefore, add value to their site. But at the end of the day, it would be reasonable to assume what they all hope is to turn reader’s engagement into a few ads bucks.

The Wall Street Journal started the online community platform about a year ago, and its quite simple. Editors post a timely question based on the news and invite readers to comment. Its marketing slogan is “Join & Become One of the Well Connected”. To ensure the civility of the comments, the Journal requires readers to use their real name when then comment. In order to keep the online community free of abuse, the Journal hired one person to monitor visitor comments for appropriate behavior. The result, of course, is fewer people are willing to participate than the Journal expected, which leads to the next question—is the effort worthwhile?

“In the Journal Community, we try to get people connected the way Linked-In does,” says David Ho who’s in charge of the community at the Wall Street Journal.

Yet, the average comments for a question is somewhere between 20 and 100. The most popular question, which was on government-sponsored health care, only gleaned around 600 comments, according to Ho.  If that’s as far as the community can reach, what justifies the effort?

“It may be that websites like the Journal focus more on building up long-term prestige,” says Chris Lasane, graphic designer at CNBC.com whose job function is similar to Ho’s at the Journal. But considering the Journal’s reputation, it hardly needs an online community which attracts some thousand visitors a day to boost up their prestige. And if it was for revenue, I doubt the ad revenue the Journal Community generates would be adequate to pay for the department’s paychecks.