How to manage an actual online community platform, with Oprah Daily’s Pilar Guzmán

The Digiday Podcast

“Community” is one of those words that has been co-opted by businesses and euthanized into a euphemism for “audiences,” “subscribers,” “customers,” etc. But Oprah Daily has created an actual community. Seriously, it’s called The Oprah Insider Community.

The platform – which costs $55 a year to access – mixes aspects of YouTube, Facebook, Slack and Reddit. Oprah Daily posts videos of live audience recordings featuring Oprah Winfrey discussing topics like the teen mental health crisis, longevity and menopause with experts. And people can comment on the videos, pose their own questions in threads for other members to respond to and send private messages to one another.

“Everything that you can do on the internet, we can embed in this platform,” said Oprah Daily editorial director Pilar Guzmán in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Of course, there’s plenty of things people can do on the internet that the Hearst-owned publication or its tens of thousands of paying subscribers may not want embedded in the platform. Having only officially launched The Oprah Insider Community in September after testing it over the summer, Oprah Daily is still sorting out its content moderation strategy. At the moment, the publication’s staffers are taking shifts – including working weekends – monitoring the platform. But Guzmán acknowledged that eventually the platform will need a more formal oversight operation.

“Check in with me in six months, and I’ll tell you. But it’s definitely something that’s on the horizon and that we’ve been earmarking in terms of our org,” she said.