10 doesn’t sound like a big number, but when you start looking back over a decade, 10 years of an ever-expanding and innovating world, 10 years feels huge and unwieldy.
At the beginning of this past decade (the first decade of the 21th Century…how cool!) I was working with an Internet company called Themestream, started by a group of engineers out of Netscape. They had made up the core team that built the Open Directory. Their vision was to take the human-filtered experience of the Open Directory and put simple content tools in the hands of the people who had the energy and vision to create content. This was an early blogging and community model. We weren’t successful: too many parts of the web were still undeveloped, but foundation assumptions of that initiative, as envisioned by Bill Turpin and Rafhael Cedeno, were dead on.
Fast forward 10 years later and the world of media and marketing is still grappling with the issues of content and community in a digital, interactive world.
The thing is, we’re at an inflection point where everything is possible. The tools are easy and effective. Consumers are willing to use them. The underlying processes of doing commerce, building online inventory, managing databases, driving audience have all been refined and tested. The challenges we all face now are how to apply these tools in logical and simple ways in order to create business models that offer sensible pricing to consumers and allow for acceptable profit margins to creators.
I think it’s really exciting.
Impressions of a decade
When I sat down to jot down some themes for this post, I could see it getting out of control. The notes have lots of questions about what was the scale of the Internet in 1999 and 2009; who were the biggest Internet companies then and now; what were the biggest themes.
Here are some of the highlights:
- US internet usage doubled in the decade to something over 160 million users. Worldwide internet usage topped 1 billion users.
- AOL acquired Time-Warner in 2000 for $117 billion. AOL had 21 million subscribers in 1999. In 2009, Time Warner spun AOL to shareholders for a fraction of the 2000 value.
- Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. GeoCities closed in October 2009.
- In the 2000 Super Bowl, 17 Internet companies spent more than $20 million to advertise. This year? Go figure.
- At the end of the decade, a handful of companies had established what appear to be embedded positions in the infrastructure of the web. Google, Amazon and Facebook are the big three, covering information, commerce and community.
Are these companies likely to have the same positions at the end of the coming decade? The early history of the web teaches us that the ubiquity of access create few obstacles to consumer switching from one service to another. Market leaders have to sustain their positions through innovation, optimal service and an unerring focus on consumer benefits. Of the three big market footholds occupied by Google, Amazon and Facebook, the only one that can create value out of creating a highly transparent and efficient engagement with the consumer is Amazon. Google and Facebook rely on inefficiencies in the consumer experience to create value.
So, here are the notes that I made as I tried to organize my impressions of what happened and what lies ahead.
First, the decade of change.
The greatest change? Connectedness.
The Dispersion of Geekiness. Technological facility isn’t a pejorative any longer.
Fidelity. I think this phenomenon doesn’t gain enough attention. Media companies of that past controlled distribution in part because they had access to tools of production that created high-fidelity replications of content, whether it was music, video or photography. Today, everyone has access to easy-to-learn tools that allow them to create true fidelity: they perform into digital formats and are able to mix, clean, assemble and share high-quality content. This trend is only going to accelerate. As a result, distribution platforms are exploding: beneath the behemoths like YouTube there are all kinds of specialty platforms for sharing high-fidelity content. Today, you can build a simple blog and use multiple plug-ins to create an exceptional sharing platform. Media companies are going to have to demonstrate the ability to add value beyond production, replication and distribution.
Composition. The idea of what a composed media experience is has changed radically. A magazine, or a magazine article, is one artifact within a wide panoply of content types. A CD is the same. A song is the same. Consumers are changing the definition of composition, shifting it to include all kinds of types. Here’s a sample. In writing, there are standard artifacts: a short story, a novel, a poem, an epic poem, an essay, a review, a sketch. Writers who wanted to reach an audience needed to define their work within artifacts that were largely dictated by the production requirements of the media provider. Today, a writer can explore new modalities of composition, gather their own audience around their own content imperative. The publishing world can’t really replicate the unique experience. Want an example? Go look at Boing Boing. It’s all there.
The value of audience. All of the economics of media in the 20th century were embodied in the value of audience. It cost a certain amount to aggregate an audience in various media. That cost was passed along, with a markup, to advertisers or to content creators. The ability to amass audience and deliver content was at the core of creating economic value. That equation has been disrupted by the rapid shape-shifting of audience on the Internet. Google and Amazon are the exceptions over the past decade to a brutal lesson: Audience aggregation is ephemeral and doesn’t support long-term brand value on the web. I believe this was a transitional phase, and that we’re moving into a new ecosystem where the concept of audience will be replaced by a community of connections. [Not an original thought, by the way.]
What’s next?
Here’s what got scribbled down on the next page in the notebook.
Mobile. Mobile doesn’t just mean place-based. If you want to understand the next iteration of the interactive ecosystem, spend time with your iPhone. That’s the whole thing, all bundled up, right there. It is the first truly futuristic device of the Interactive revolution. Think about it. The guys on Star Trek couldn’t even have imagined what the iPhone does, how it works, how it becomes the operating system for your life. Mobile beens portable and interoperable. It means adaptable and intelligent. It means instantaneous and flexible. It’s a synthesis of all of the beneficial functionality that has been developed on the web over the past 20 years. Mobile is so big that it isn’t even its own thing: it’s the ultimate expression of everything.
OK. Get ready for this, because I wrote it down, but I’m not a 100% sure what it means, even though I’m a 100% sure it’s right.
Information/Entertainment/Content as the operating system.
This is the reverse engineering of the mobile experience onto the web. My iPhone interface, in its modularity and integration, is superior to anything that I’m able to accomplish with my laptop. The entire operating system is designed around the I/E/C paradigm, with an emphasis on easy functionality. The iPhone is the fastest adopted media platform in history. It’s lessons are more than Mobile; they are about what is necessary for ubiquitous consumer adoption.
Identity & Community. The trends that we see in social networks today are a point in time of a long-term evolution. These trends will continue to evolve because they satisfy a kind of use that all of us are looking for in our personal technology: How can it help me communicate easily across multiple shifting communities, without having to make radical changes in my behavior and while still managing my personal boundaries within the multiple groups.
Filtering. Get all this information and all these people connected in all these ways and the concept of filtering becomes more and more important. One of the most interesting developments of the past 12 months is how primitive Google has come to look. Google’s search is nowhere near as elegant or as filtered as the output of a well-developed social graph. We’re at the beginning of something large in filtering. How large? Imagine if I were able to search all of the content consumed by my social graph, with the different results coded against the different cohorts that I am connected with. I ask a question about media trends, and I first see the results of content that people in my social graph have accessed and consumed, possibly rated by them as well. The results are weighted by the frequency of my interaction with certain people. And then, when I look for an accountant in Fairfield County, CT, I see results that are filtered through another prism of my social graph. I would know that everything that I am looking at has been favorably interacted with by someone that I have a connection with. That’s an elegant filter.
And then, the last one:
The Quantum Theory of Content.
For companies to establish connections with consumers that can result in some economic benefit to both parties, the entire process of creating and distributing content will change. If you’ve read this far, you probably have read other things I’ve written, and you are familiar with some of the crude thinking I’ve done along these lines. Content needs to be conceived of on a molecular level, with the understanding that this content will combine and re-combine with other discrete content objects. The force that will drive this recombinant nature of content will be the interactive consumer. [This phenomenon includes marketing content as well.]
The content imperative of social media is the starting point for this re-envisioning. What it will look like in 10 years is anyone’s guess.
This isn’t the death knell of long-form content. It’s not the end of traditional media formats. It’s not the end of advertising and marketing.
However, if you want to be a relevant content brand in the next decade, you need to have direct connections with consumers — you need them to invite you into their social graph. The art will be in the kind of content that you share, the way that you share it and the degree to which the consumer feels that the sharing is open and conforms to their habits and needs. If you are able to do this, you’ll have the kind of access to consumers that will support your overarching business goals.
There you have: some impressions of what the themes of the next 10 years will be. I’m looking forward to sorting out practical applications for my businesses. I’m looking forward to being creative in this milieux. And, I’m especially looking forward to experiencing the vast realm of things that I didn’t see coming.
Have a Happy New Year.
