Thinkcorps

Just a few things I wanted to jot down today.

Does the Web Need Unions?
With the growth of online video, everyone’s looking for new ways to exploit its popularity. I think its current appeal is its focus on user-gen video—individual participation. Levelling the playing field is also fun—The Dixie Chicks have to compete for attention along with everyone’s funny little video clips. It’s a meritocracy the audience controls—and which the studios are negotiating an escape from even now.

Since studios have money, they believe they should get special treatment from the MySpaces and Youtube’s of the world, and will blur the lines between advertising and content to get it. I imagine that by the end of this year, we’re going to see a lot of “new features” and content deals from Web companies looking to capitalize on or “monetize” their popularity. But it will likely come at the expense of their users and the meritocracy.

Promoting studio content above others because they paid is like forcing regular users to use the servant’s door, and once the screen real estate tips past a certain ratio of paid to user-gen content, the community will begin to fall apart.

It’s a delicate balance, and I believe the Web companies would be best served by adopting a variation on the editorial guidelines for magazines set up by ASME. Users need to be protected, especially now that they’re your suppliers. You might even consider hiring someone as a “user representative”, like a union boss, to protect their interests.

Citizen Journalism: Misses not Hits
Mark Cuban’s invested in citizen journalism site sharesleuth.com (nothing live yet). This site sounds interesting. They will focus on stock fraud and executive malfeasance. I can definitely see a demand for this, or rather an obsession. But I wonder, given this example, whether the goals of citizen journalism might be very different than traditional journalism.

Journalism is a specialized job designed to create “news” for a (general or niche) public. I see citizen journalism being more of a community fueled by the stories that don’t quite make it into the papers: the inside pages, local incidents, people, city government, etc. Issues are driven (like online video above) by users, not by advertiser-driven business concerns. I’d bet that “citizen journalism” will be co-opted by newspaper companies within 2 to 3 years, it’s the perfect way to get their readership back.

Myspace: Here Today …
Michael at TechCrunch writes about some staggering MySpace stats (created by Paul Kedrosky). The thing that gets me about these figures is that I’m completely convinced that MySpace is a flash-in-the-pan, and that they will not be what they are now in 5 years.

What these numbers say to me is that: Kids are very comfortable living online; an Internet “hit” will soon dwarf a TV “hit” in terms of raw numbers; and that old media companies will continue to salivate over these properties, paying top dollar while failing to monetize them over their ever-shorter lifecycles.

So the clock is ticking for Fox, which had better bust a hump making some cash off MySpace, because the writing is already on the wall. I don’t think the site is still as popular with young kids as they think; it’s also being overrun with small businesses and spammers looking for customers on the cheap. A victim of its own success.

To me, MySpace represents the amazing fluidity of the Internet. It is not easy to create an audience that large, the medium has to be almost frictionless to support that. Of course, being frictionless means that your audience never truly stops. You may slow them down for a while, get them in orbit around your service, but eventually, they will escape your gravity and move on.

There are two truths that MySpace cannot contravert: New and Cool. The march of time erodes both, and soon all the kids will move on and create something even bigger and more spectacular.

Update: Fox announces that it’s outsourcing its ad biz to the highest bidder. Fox may have its own ambitions in the ad space, but I think this announcement makes it clear that they realize there is a (currently open) window to capitalize on MySpace’s popularity.