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If something is going wrong it is and it always was popular to blame a technology for it (mostly because a technology can not response to it). The church did it for example when printing was invented and Andrew Keen is doing so in his blog post The Great Seduction: Confessions of an Internet iconoclast. He is blaming the Web 2.0 for destroying our culture and business. He is right in his analysis, but wrong in his conclusions:
The biggest financial problem is that the supposedly new media economy of blogs and YouTube videos isn’t making the content creators much money. That’s because today’s digital technology has made almost all content free, thereby undermining media’s historically successful business model of selling content to consumers. [...] The greatest losers, then, in this great cultural transformation are our traditional creative class – professional musicians, journalists, film-makers, photographers and animators — who are now struggling to monetize their talent in an advertising saturated economy where all the serious cash is being channeled to technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace.
Yes, people are not willing to pay for content, because the content does not provide an added value to them! In the past, information was restricted. It provided a competitive advantage or it gave you social status. In the Internet age, information is available everywhere and everytime. Thus our old business models fail and companies that relied on these old business models will fail too! That’s economy. That’s evolution. Don’t blame technology for it!
I do not agree with Andrew Keen that the creative class is suffering from these changes. The opposite is true. Never in history there have been such possibilities for creative persons to show and to monetize their work without the need of large corporations. The Internet democratizes the media distribution. Thus more people will profit, but in less quantity. It’s bad for a few, but good for many.
I agree with Andrew Keen that technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace profit most from the new business paradigm, but only because the existing market players are not willing to invest in new market ideas. The media companies have to overcome their fear and to reconquer their markets. They know better how to serve the consumers’ needs than a technology provider like Google. They have the content that consumers are urging for, but they have to unclose their content.
So take the risks and have a good time!
Martin
Very, very interesting thoughts about designing a social game:
By spending time in the “social gaming” space, it’s interesting to see the intersection of approaches from both the consumer internet folks versus the traditional game folks. In addition to business models (ads versus subs/virtual goods) or product emphasis (functionality versus storytelling/characters/etc) or other topics, I’m particularly fascinated by the difference in how they think about their players/users and their activities.
Let’s look at the two approaches – both the “Web 2.0″ view as well as the games perspective. The former is represented by a pyramid, and the other is a 2-axis landscape.
Read the full article: Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: Social gaming design – Bartle types versus Web 2.0 participation pyramid
I loved SimCity, I played it for hours, okey to be honest, weeks; I’m a fan of Wills Wright (the SimCity creator) game design philosophy; I’m a bioinformatician who is very interested in evolutionary theories; I’m a convinced web 2.0 enthusiast. Now, mix Will Wright, Web 2.0 and evolutionary theory and you get probably the most addictive game ever! It’s called Spore and GigaOM has a preview on it. Oh shit, the launch of Spore will put real risk on our venture ;-)
Sharp tongues say that “Web 2.0 means selling people their own content via advertising”. This does not work, of course:
The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media†sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.
Read the full article: FT.com / Companies / Media & internet – Web 2.0 fails to produce cash
Great posting:
The idea that software on the Web is going to be largely funded by advertising is just so wrong-headed, I hardly know where to start. It had me spluttering in the latest BriefingsDirect Insights analyst podcast hosted by Dana Gardner — more on that in a moment. Let’s move on from 1.0 notions of the Web as just a publishing medium, with ads on the side. Doc Searls already pronounced what I consider to be advertising’s epitaph way back in March 2006: “Why build an economy around Attention, when Intention is where the money comes from?â€
Read on: Web 2.0 and the end of advertising | Software as Services | ZDNet.com
Duane Nickull, senior technology evangelist at Adobe, published an read worthy article about the history and the future of the web:
The Web as we knew it in 1995 has already largely died. Out of the ashes has arisen a second incarnation and we are currently on the verge of a new reality, Web 2.0. While there is no one definition, Web 2.0 is perhaps best described as the migration to the web as a platform spanning all connected devices, coupled with a specific set of patterns.
Read on: CREATE OR DIE! > Das Ende des Web, wie wir es kennen
You are doing a Web 2.0 business? Than read this:
Ultimately, it’s clear that Web 2.0 folks can learn a lot from creating the types of incentive systems that folks in the virtual worlds industry can often do.
Read on at Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: What every Web 2.0 entrepreneur should know about virtual goods
The Startup-Day is an exciting event at the webinale conference ’08 in Germany, Karlsruhe:
The webinale is the holistic web conference in Germany: it covers business and technology. For example there is one special day called the Startup-Day for internet startups.
The Magnificent Seven will talk about
- how to manage a web 2.0 startup
- how to get money from investors
- how to convince the High-Tech Gründerfonds
- how to avoid common pitfalls
- how to scale a startup team
- how to build social prototypes
- how to become a cybernetic entrepreneur
My job is one of a nanny: I’ll care about the founders and the investors. Yup, you are also invited, dear business angels and venture capitalists! So take chance and contact me. And have a good time!
Here you find some random thoughts from me about the Web, especially about the Social Web and it’s famous player: You, the social being!
Have a good time!
We don’t have a name, yet, because we spend more time on developing a fascinating product than on inventing brand names with a lot of o’s or a’s. And no, you won’t get stock options if you tell us a name and we pick it!
We are not Web 2.0 because we don’t let our customers generate the content and then let them pay for it by bombarding them with ads. Users want to use something because they have needs, i.e. to organize their photos online. The result may be user-generated content, or as we say it, user-created content, but it’s not their aim!
We are no social network because communities are not the end but the way to the customer. In the end, there must be an advantage for the customer and not for the marketing agency!
What are we? Find out and register for our newsletter or subscribe to our RSS feed. And have a good time!
