Tuesday, October 30, 2001

Columbia University's Fathom Seeks New Users Among Readers of 'The New Yorker' By SCOTT CARLSON It takes an ambitious kind of company to aspire to advertise inside the back cover of The New Yorker. There you'll find the likes of Rolex and Acura, the pop icons featured in Absolut Vodka spots, and ... Fathom? An advertisement for the for-profit -- but not yet profitable -- online-learning venture appeared inside the back cover of the October 29 issue of the renowned literary magazine, in a space that can go for as much as $65,000. The ad promotes an online course that Fathom is offering in conjunction with Simon Schama's A History of Britain television series, appearing on the History Channel. Mr. Schama is a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. The ad marks a new step for Fathom, which until recently has relied mainly on so-called viral marketing -- adspeak for "word of mouth" -- and on building a base of users through the students, alumni, and staff and faculty members of its member institutions. Fathom, which sells courses and offers scholarly articles online, is a venture that was started by Columbia and that includes a dozen other colleges, museums, and the like. Ann G. Kirschner, the president of Fathom, says that this institution-based marketing remains the company's main strategy, but she is also testing the water for an expanded marketing effort. "Our core audience is still the member group," she says. "But we are beginning to reach beyond that group on an experimental basis to understand how best to grow the audience." "Our understanding of how to serve the population that is coming to Fathom is changing day by day," she says. The ads, which have also run on The New York Times Web site and Microsoft's Encarta site, are helping Fathom's marketers "begin to understand, when this is rolled out as a real business, what the marketing requirements are going to be." "How big of an audience do you have to attract, and how do you reach them in a way that has very targeted cost-efficiencies of marketing?" When A History of Britain ran on BBC over the summer, Fathom placed ads for Mr. Schama's course in the BBC History Magazine. Ms. Kirschner says that publication, like The New Yorker, appeals to what she thinks of as Fathom's customer base: the intellectual generalist and the armchair scholar. The look of Fathom's site has also changed recently. Users are able to customize the site by member institution. For example, one could bring the courses and articles about film to more-prominent positions on the site by choosing the American Film Institute from a dropdown menu on the left side of the screen. A user who picks RAND will see more articles about politics and policy. Mr. Schama's noncredit course -- he chose the materials and is the narrator -- sells for $36, and is part of another marketing effort at Fathom. By offering cheap, short, noncredit courses, Ms. Kirschner and her partners hope to attract new users to try out their first distance courses, and then lure them into signing up for more-comprehensive -- and more-expensive -- offerings. Ms. Kirschner says Fathom's site carries about 700 courses, fewer than 100 of which are of the inexpensive, noncredit variety. "But it's the most rapidly growing segment of our inventory because we are actively acquiring and commissioning them from our member institutions," she adds. She says the courses have gotten a "strong response," but she won't divulge how many students have signed up for them. Fathom's members are the American Film Institute, the British Library, the Cambridge University Press, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Natural History Museum in London, the New York Public Library, RAND, the Science Museum in London, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, along with the founding member, Columbia. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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