Photo credit: Mark Stehle
Google the word “knowledge,” and look closely at the websites that appear on the first page.
The Wikipedia entry rests at the top (no surprise there), but running a close second is Penn’s own online business journal, Knowledge@Wharton.
Executive Director and Editor-in-chief Mukul Pandya explains that when the publication began in May of 1999, the nonexistent marketing budget forced them to get creative. So, they built momentum by licensing their content to other publications and requiring them to link back to Knowledge@Wharton. Over the years, the number of links grew, and when Google came along—which bases its list of relevant sites on how many other web sites link to yours—Knowledge@Wharton found itself rising to the top.
“People say it’s good to be good, but it’s better to be lucky,” says Pandya. “There’s living proof!”
But the success of the online publication (knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu) is more than mere luck. Knowledge@Wharton now has editions in Spanish and Portuguese, Chinese and has launched an edition about India, as well as similar sites developed in conjunction with other business schools. Its podcasts are downloaded about 200,000 times a month, and it has created successful partnerships with corporate sponsors such as GE, The Boston Consulting Group and Cisco. Content has been reproduced in places ranging from Forbes to CNET News.com, and in July, the entire network crossed the one million mark in subscribers. “We’ve just scratched the surface,” says Pandya. “This is just the first million. There are 6 billion people in the world and a lot of them would benefit if they had business knowledge delivered to them for free that they could use to improve their own circumstances.”
Q. What was your original vision for Knowledge@Wharton, and how does that compare with what it’s become?
A. The idea behind Knowledge@Wharton was really to take knowledge at the school and to make it available to a worldwide business audience. Considering the fact that, in 1999, we were living through the dot-com bubble, the Internet seemed to be the best way to do it.
I was very lucky in that the school liked that idea and gave us the resources to do something like that. But I had absolutely no idea how it would do. In fact, in the business plan, we had projected about 3,000 subscribers in our first year. Much to my surprise, when we launched Knowledge@Wharton on May 27, 1999, in about 48 hours after publication, we had 1,000 subscribers in 33 countries. And the goal we had set of 3,000 for the first year, we crossed that at the end of our third week. We ended the year with 33,000 subscribers. We added another 66,000 in our second year. It took us about 25 months to get to our first 100,000 subscribers.
Q. What do you attribute you success to? Did you just tap into something at the right time?
A. I spent some time looking at what other schools were doing on the web. Although web-based publications did exist at other business schools, one thing that was true of all of those publications is they were just digital copies of print publications. We at Wharton had the great advantage that we didn’t have a print publication to cannibalize and so we could imagine a new publication that would use the web as its primary publishing medium.
What we have tried to do is not think so much about ourselves but what people need to know, and think of what we are doing as a knowledge capturing and distribution system.
Q. What’s your readership like?
A. Our readership is about 70 percent business, 25 percent academic and 5 percent is people in government and in the military and in the media. Of the 70 percent who are in business, about 12 to 13 percent are CEOs or company presidents, founders and so forth. About 35 percent are senior management, 45 percent are middle management and the rest are analysts or researchers, librarians. The other interesting thing about our audience is very few of them—just about 5 percent of them—have had any formal affiliation with Wharton or Penn. This has been a wonderful way for us to reach business executives who don’t have a formal relationship with the school.
Our demographic is actually very similar to The Economist or The Wall Street Journal and I think that’s largely driven by the kind of content we produce. Our focus is not so much on providing information as providing insight because there are many sources of information—the news media, and frankly we can’t compete with the news media as far as delivering information goes. We’re not equipped to do that. But what we are equipped to do is help people make sense of the information that they get from the news. We sometimes describe our mission as providing the knowledge behind the news.
Q. What kind of staff do you have to run this whole enterprise?
A. The real reason why Knowledge@Wharton is what it is, is because we have just the most incredible team of people. Robbie Shell is an absolutely superb editor and Steve Guglielmi is a senior editor. They help to ensure that the editorial quality of the publication and all its editions remains high. I also have some amazing technical colleagues—David Siedell and Sanjay Modi. Lucia Zapatero is the senior associate director of marketing and Trish Palmeri is the administrative assistant for our team, but she is just an amazing person who does so much more.
Knowledge@Wharton wouldn't be what it is without this amazing team.
We've also been very lucky to have very strong support from the school's leadership. When we started out Bob Mittelstaedt, who was the Vice Dean for External Affairs and Executive Education, had the vision that this could become. When I first remember showing him the plans, he said, you've made one mistake in this plan and that is, you underestimated how big this could be.
Q. How is working at Knowledge different than your experiences working elsewhere?
A. Having come out of the world of print journalism, I had gotten into the bad habit of thinking of the editor as being a proxy for the reader’s interests. Online, your judgment is constantly verified instantly, very specifically and very brutally. We constantly get feedback on what we publish. It has been a very humbling experience, but a very good learning experience.
Q. So, what do people want to read about?
A. The kind of stories that people really respond to—leadership stories would probably be at the top of the list. Articles on marketing are always popular. Articles that help people to do their business better either though cutting their costs, dealing with globalization. What has been satisfying is being able to connect the University’s knowledge with those problems and helping them solve it.
Originally published Sept. 6, 2007.
