So I was asked to share my paper about the SuicideGirls here on my page. I decided why not!
The only thing that I must ask of those who read my paper, if you use it ANYWHERE please, please, PLEASE make sure you cite/credit me. I am a Master's student and my work is professional and my own. If you have any questions about how to site or if you just want to use the paper, just ask! I promise I wont bite.
Thanks!!
Who are the SuicideGirls?
In our world today, many organizations are using not only their company websites to connect with their audiences, they are also using social media to further their reach. In addition, companies are not providing simply free products or services to their consumers, but offer paid services as well. There are both benefits and consequences to businesses who provide only free or paid products, or even a combination of the two. The organization known as SuicideGirls is an excellent example of a company that utilizes both free and paid (membership) content. On their social media platforms, most of the content is free, providing almost the same content as the membership option. However, through the membership plan a deeper and more engaged community is fostered through access to more than just the company content, but also communication platforms and niche-groups that audiences can utilize. It is unclear whether or not the free content that the organization provides is detrimental to the brand and the same goes for the paid content. Nonetheless, SuicideGirls is a successful organization that only keeps growing and engaging its audiences.
So what is SuicideGirls? SuicideGirls is an online community that has been celebrating alternative forms of beauty since 2001 (SG Founder). The organization was founded by Missy (last names are not used for any of the models or workers for the company) in Portland, Oregon (SG Founder). Missy wanted to provide a place for women who did not conform to the beauty standards of the world to come together and be surrounded by other women like themselves (SG Founder). She created a global art empire of the “sexiest, smartest, and most dangerous collection of outsider women” (SG Founder). Today, it has grown into a giant sorority made up of over 2,500 models from every continent even including Antarctica (SG Founder).
Missy came up with the name SuicideGirls because of how the general population saw these pin-up, alternative women as committing social suicide by being tattooed and pierced, or by having crazy, extreme jobs such as being a fire performer or a UFC boxer (SG Founder). The slogan, “what some people think makes us strange, or weird, or fucked up, we think is what makes us beautiful,” perfectly explains the ideologies of the organization (SG Founder). With even more submissions than Play Boy, the organization chooses from member submissions, the most unique and beautiful women to gain the title of SuicideGirl (SG Founder). Once the title is gained the models are given journals where they can share their ideas, thoughts, and feelings about the world with their audiences either on the membership website or on social media creating engagement between members and models (SG Founder).
Today, the main website (suicidegirls.com) has more than a half million subscribers and more than five million visitors per month (SG Founder). The biggest age group to join the online community is between 18-24 years old, making up about 58% of subscribers, with those aged 25-34 at 34% and those 35+ at 8% (SG Founder). About 51% of subscribers are female with the remaining 49% being males (SG Founder). Their social networks reach about 3.2 million North American fans with a new fan being added every ten seconds (SG Founder). Per month, on average, the organization reaches between 1.5 and 50 million people just through the main website (SG Founder). On Facebook, SuicideGirls has more than 6.5 million fans and about two million followers on Instagram (SG Founder). The organization is ranked as one of the top twenty brands on Instagram (SG Founder). On both Twitter and Tumblr, they have about 250 thousand followers (SG Founder). They also have presences on Google Plus, Vine, Pheed, Pinterest and more (SG Founder). In the United States, SuicideGirls also have three movies airing on Showtime (SG Founder). Finally, their annual BlackHeart Burlesque Tour in the U.S., Australia, and Canada sells out in almost every city (SG Founder) It is easy to see the expanse of the organizations reach and why they receive over 1,000 applications a week from women who want to join the community (SG Founder).
How does an organization create such a successful online campaign? The overall goal of the community is to give members and models a place to come together and meet new people who also share the same unique and obscure interests as themselves (SG Founder). The main website provides more than a half million photographs, along with message boards, groups, member journals, and image hosting platforms which gives members and models plenty of content to enjoy, alter, and create content of their own (SG Founder).There is also a news wire that provides pop culture news and opinions, as well as daily interviews with interesting celebrities to keep members engaged and updated about the outside world (SG Founder). Besides online content, SuicideGirls also have traditional, print content such a books, movies and merchandise for members and models to purchase (SG Founder). Models typically have their own social media platforms where they provide free content to their followers as well. Many use Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to give an insight to their own lives, promote their modeling career at SuicideGirls and get audiences to sign up for the paid membership plan on the main website.
The online content that the organization provides is successful for multiple reasons. Frick and Eyler-Werve in Chapter Four of their text Return on Engagement shed light on how to make a website engaging and easy for audiences to use. They explain that technology, content, interaction design, and navigation all need to come together to create an engaging site for audiences to use. SuicideGirls has done just that. First, they made their content user friendly for multiple forms of technology including mobile contexts. On the mobile platform, they have prioritized site functions so that the navigation pane is clear and highly visible and also the site loads very quickly which are two strategies that should be used for mobile optimization (Frick and Eyler-Werve).
On the desktop version of the website, the architecture is highly usable. For example, the navigation bar is at the top of the home page and lists actions that the organization wants the audiences to take in a progressive order. This accomplishes the goal that Frick and Eyler-Werve explain in their text about making the site as simple and intuitive as possible for viewers to take action. The design for visual appeal aspect is also in check with the ideologies of Frick and Eyler-Werve. The colors that are used on the site, pink and black, are relevant to the industry; pink for feminism and black for edge. The background is a neutral color which helps makes the content-heavy site much easier to digest and provides high contrast for readability. However, the website falls short on the color of the font; the text is white and the background is black which can make it difficult to read. However, the design convention of the site follow rules that Frick and Eyler-Werve outlined such as the logo and the navigation pane being at the top of the page, the search function in the top right and contact information in the footer of the text. Clearly, the web designer for SuicideGirls is highly skilled in creating a website that is direct, easy-to-use, and engaging.
When producers and consumers integrate, communication technologies become supercharged (Deuze). SuicideGirls is an excellent example of the integration of producers and consumers on their main website and on social networks. The organization sees its members as collaborators and producers of content through their membership privileges and the model’s personal social media sites (Jenkins). Members makes their own personal information spaces by posting their own journals, photographs, and videos which helps them to cultivate their identities through the creation of their virtual representations of themselves; the models create their own personal information spaces as well (Deuze). According to Deuze, weblogs are intimately personal modes of self-expression and empowerment. By having both the models (producers) and the members (consumers) creating their own weblogs, they can build online communities that bond together over similar beliefs, and connect with each other through feedback (Deuze). From each end of the spectrum there is participation making an environment for total engagement on the main website (Jenkins & Jenkins et. Al.). In this convergence culture, everyone is a participant (Jenkins).
SuicideGirls has created a “cult” environment in the online world because the main focus of the company is to give those who go against the main stream a place to convene and interact with those similar to them (Jenkins et. Al.). They rely heavily on cult niche audiences to engage with the company and join it (Jenkins et. Al.). In order to gather these cult members, the producers had to create a transmedia space that would appeal to all of the different niche audiences (Jenkins et. Al.). SuicideGirls has done this by creating groups on the main website. These groups range from serial book readers to anime lovers and more. These groups allow members and models to build strong bonds through common affinity which in turn makes them both more loyal to the organization (Jenkins et. Al.). By providing spreadable and transmedia to their cult audience members the company has courted them in such a way that members and models want to share themselves and the content provided by SuicideGirls with others to build an even stronger collective identity (Jenkins et. Al.)
According to Jenkins, Ford, and Green “companies must be careful not to define too narrowly who can participate or how to participate” with an organization. SuicideGirls has triumphed over this which has led to the development of a unique culture of members and models online. By allowing for members and models to mold the culture of the organization it creates a culture that can change rapidly based on its situational qualities (Peterson and Anand). The culture is constantly being produced and reconfigured through “sustained collective activity” of its members and models interacting with one another (Peterson and Anand).
The way the company uses technology allows audiences to influence culture. “Digital media have also influence[d] culture by making possible the creation of cybergroups,” which is exactly what the groups on SuicideGirls’ main website facilitate (Peterson and Anand). Members and models share their photos and videos of things they like to do and also respond back to each other with their own videos, photos and comments. Through technology the company has made it possible for everyone to communicate with one another as well as the organization through networks and circles (Peterson and Anand).
The culture of SuicideGirls is easily developed because of the company’s mission to bring together those who feel as if they are outcasts, or rebels to the norms of society. According to Peterson and Anand, “young people take the products tendered to them by the culture industries and recombine them in unique ways to show their resistance to the dominant culture and to give expression to their own identities.” An example of this can be seen by looking at the models and members themselves. Many of them are marked with tattoos or modified by body piercings. But these represent different parts of culture from their worlds around them outside of SuicideGirls. For example, the tattoos of some of the models reference classic authors or novels or the types of piercings such as the stretched ears of the Spanish models may represent their ancestors.
Members and models alike have taken aspects of their cultures and replicated them on their own bodies to show their affiliations. SuicideGirls have given them a place where they can take these unique ways of showing their own culture, which breakaway from the dominant culture, and express their identities with those who have done the same. Many of those who do not stick to the norm are “stigmatized as ‘different’” which makes them “seek out like-minded rebels and consolidate [those] distinctive set of cultural choices” in order to build a “group identity” where they feel they are no longer stigmatized (Peterson and Anand). At SuicideGirls it is a culture of mixed cultures that are represented in ways that are not the traditional standard, where they are not critiqued, but celebrated for being different.
Now, SuicideGirls offers both free and paid content for members and outsiders. Either can be excellent tools to help the company grow and stay active, but they can also have ramifications. In our world today so much content is free, or has the illusion that it is free (Chu). Technically there is no free media, there is only the illusion that users get free content through a “shared economy” and money is not an issue, but is it for those behind the content (Chu). Audiences are addicted to getting content for free to the point where sometimes the free content for a brand is enough to keep the audience around (Chu). When content is seen as free, audiences will try to get ahold all of it without hassle, or payment (Chu). Without payment, companies need to find alternative ways to get funding which tend to seem sneaky once the audiences who expect content to be free find out that it is never really free (Chu).
This could be a potential issue for SuicideGirls. A personal example: I first started following SuicideGirls back when I just turned eighteen. I only consumed their free content. It took me three years to finally join the membership plan with the organization. Personally, I acted as a “pirate” would; it was not that I was refusing to pay for the company’s content, but I found that I could view a lot of it without having to pay anything (Jenkins et. Al.). As an outsider I still could feel that I was part of the community without actually joining it. This is harmful because it is truly unclear how many people where just like me, and still consume only the free content from the company. However, Jenkins, Ford, and Green explain that a company does not need 100 percent convergence to paid content to be prosperous and thriving.
So, having an audience on the outside does have benefits. It can also push the free content consumers to eventually become paid content consumers, similar to my story. According to Jenkins, Ford, and Green, “people initially learn through ‘lurking’ or observing from the margins” about an organization. Audiences primarily start out as lurkers in order to learn about the organization and how to interact with members once they actually join the community (Jenkins et. Al.). “Novices become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community [and] gradually, as new comers become oldtimers, their participation takes forms that are more and more central to the functioning of the community” (Jenkins et. Al.). According to Jenkins, Ford, and Green, being a lurker, or a consumer of free content is only a “stepping stone toward greater engagement.”
Still, those who do only consume free media do help to benefit the company as well. As Jenkins, Ford, and Green explain, those who consume free content are going to talk about it. Word of mouth can be just as beneficial as audience members paying for content because it still give the brand reach and gets others who hear about it the idea to start consuming content from the company in their own way; meaning those who hear about it will end up being an audience member who pays, and the next will be one who does not, and so on. Material is still valuable if it is free, but also easily spreadable (Jenkins et. Al.). As long as the media spreads, some will sign up for the paid version of content because they want to experience all of it and others will only consumer the free content because that is enough for them.
Although, paid content does have more benefits because it is always helping the company and keeping audience members away from the illusion that content is free. “Subscription-based models where the readers pay directly for content that they want lead to a relatively stable revenue model” (Chu). As long as there is money flow the company should be able to sustain itself, which SuicideGirls does very well.
When a membership is needed it helps the audience members to see that they are actually consuming something; the company is providing them with a product or service (Chu). Even though SuicideGirls mainly sells photographs and a place to interact with an online community, it is still a service and a product that it needs to sell. When audiences see that there is a membership fee, it keeps them “aware that the photos [they] like looking at or the blog posts [they] like reading cost someone time and energy to create” (Chu). When hard work is realized, audience members can have a greater sense of appreciate for the content they are consuming; I know, that is how I feel now that I am a member of the community (Jenkins et. Al.). Paid services bring to light that SuicideGirls, and other companies, are organizations that have goals that need to be fulfilled; free content, alone, will not be able to sustain that.
SuicideGirls has been a thriving company for over fourteen years now. Their reach is so expansive that it touches every continent in the world. From all over the globe members and models can come together to feel that they are part of a community that accepts them for their uniqueness and odd qualities when the rest of the world has pushed them to the side. Through the way they produce content, it allows for a culture to be grown out of the cybergroups that are formed through the SuicideGirls groups and interactions on the main website and through social media. No one is excluded; all are accepted.
It can be an issue for the organization that so much content is for free because not every lurker will end up being a paid consumer. However, the free content gives lurkers the opportunity to spread the word about the organization and learn how to interact within the community, eventually leading them to be paid consumers. Paid content is the best option for SuicideGirls because it keeps the organization transparent; content is hard work to produce and it is never free. When content needs to be paid for it brings to light that if a consumer truly believes in the work of SuicideGirls then the content should be paid for as an appreciate tactic for all of the work that goes into the content from the models, members, and the organization itself. Overall, SuicideGirls is a successful organization that reaches out to those who feel that they never had a place to belong because they were weird or non-conformists to society. Their slogan is true, “what some people think makes us strange, or weird, or fucked up, we think is what makes us beautiful” (SG Founder).
Works Cited
Chu, Arthur. "The High Cost of Instagram Modeling." The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 7 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.
Deuze. "Liquid Life, Work, and Media." N.p.: n.p., n.d. 1-43. Print.
Frick, Tim, and Kate Eyler-Werve. "Chapter 4 Design Strategy an Integrated Approach." Return on Engagement: Content, Strategy, and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. Boston, MA: Focal, 2010. N. pag. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?" N.p.: n.p., n.d. 135-73. Print.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York & London: New York UP, 2013. Print.
Peterson, Richard A., and N. Anand. "The Production of Culture Perspective." Annu. Rev. Sociol. Annual Review of Sociology 30.1 (2004): 311-34. Web.
SG Founder, Missy. "About." SuicideGirls. Wordpress, n.d. Web. 07 Nov. 2015.