Websites in the Same Space as F’d Up Friday
R U Aware?
Type of site: Purely educational website about alcohol
http://www.runet.edu/~kcastleb/toc.html
This is the first thing that comes up when you Google search
“alcohol education.” The site itself is
well designed and easy to use, as it breaks down information about alcohol into
12 different links. Each link leads to a
topic, such as “The Affect Alcohol has on You” or “Myths and Facts about Alcohol.” The site contains good information about
alcohol, and presents it in a manner that is easy to read, yet
informative. The information itself is
very similar to the educational information I want to present in my
website. However, this site suffers from
the same problem that numerous other alcohol education websites on the
internet: Nobody visits them. Alexa.com shows R U Aware as having an
average of 2 unique visitors a week.
This is why I want to incorporate entertainment and topics that appeal
to high school / college males, specifically about drinking, to draw them into
the website. I believe without something
entertaining to draw high school / college males into the site, nobody will
ever end up benefiting from the alcohol education knowledge presented on the
site.
AlcoholEdu
Type of site: Mandatory interactive site in which incoming
college freshman must complete a program
www.alcoholedu.com
AlcoholEdu and a few others are mandatory alcohol education
websites that contain an alcohol education program incoming college freshman
must complete before beginning college. The
program contains quizzes, audio and video clips, graphs, statistics, and other
vital information about alcohol.
AlcoholEdu tries to connect with high school / college students by
having audio/video clips presented by other high school / college age
students. However, this is AlcoholEdu’s
only attempt to draw their target audience in, and it fails. Just like every other attempt to educate
teenagers about alcohol, AlcoholEdu tends to preach against alcohol as some
sort of evil. Drinking is inevitable in
college, there are students who are going to drink and there are those who are
not. The students who are not going to
drink in college are receiving no benefit from AlcoholEdu because they are not
going to drink anyway, and the students who are going to drink in college
ignore AlcoholEdu because it presents the alcohol education in the same way
educators have been presenting alcohol education their entire lives. Again, F’d Up Friday is meant to appeal to
teenagers and be a site they enjoy going to, so users can eventually move from
the entertainment portion of the website to the educational.
Tucker Max / College Humour
Type of site: Glorifying
alcohol
www.tuckermax.com / www.collegehumour.com
Tucker Max is undeniably successful. He fulfilled a niche that nobody had really
explored, appealing to the “manly” side of men.
His website became wildly popular and his book stayed on the New York
Times’ best sellers list for over a month despite Tucker Max’s unbelievable
problems in finding a publisher. College
Humour too, is a website in the same vein, glorifying alcohol consumption in
college through funny stories / pictures / videos and other content. This is the audience F’d Up Friday is meant
to tap into, the testosterone-driven male.
There are a lot of them out there, and business is only just beginning
to tap into its customer/user-potential.
Unlike Tucker Max, F’d Up Friday will also have educational value, and
will attempt to be neutral on the subject of alcohol, neither glorifying nor
demeaning it.
last modified: Andrew Schroeder, 06/05/2008
