Web Services That Cater To Both The Publisher And The Reader
I’ve been noticing a trend lately that certain web services are starting to cater to both the publisher and the reader. And I think this is an important direction for a host of reasons.
You have to build a service with the user/reader in mind or you won’t get any uptake. But if you can’t engage the content creator in your service, you’ll lose something important. When publishers start paying attention to a service, they build hooks into their content that drive more users to the service. An early example of that were the "digg this" and "post to delicious" links that publishers put at the end of their stories.
And monetization opportunities can result from publishers engaging with the service. A good example of this is the sponsored posts section on techmeme. Publishers and bloggers come to techmeme every day to see what the tech world is talking about, but also to see if any of their stories got picked up. So it makes perfect sense that Gabe offers publishers the ability to feature their content for a price on the right side of the page. I’ve suggested to Gabe that he do more to service publishers. The leaderboard is one very smart thing he’s done. But he could do more. There’s no page on techmeme where I can go type in my blog url or feed and then see stats on my posts. I tried to use techmeme search for that, but it’s not really suited for that application.
Outside.in (one of our portfolio companies) does a great job with this. The outside.in front page and the personalized radar page are totally designed for the every day reader, showing them what is happening in their neighborhood. But they have a page for publishers that allows me to give them my blog info and get stats on how many of my posts have been picked up for each location they service and who else is blogging about those stories, places, and neighborhoods. By engaging the publishers and local bloggers in their service, outside.in insures that all of their content is coming into outside.in and they engage these publishers in various monetization opportunities that outside.in offers publishers and local bloggers.
A service I’ve started using a lot lately is bit.ly built by our friends at Betaworks (our firm does not have an interest in bit.ly). John Borthwick of Betaworks has a good post on bit.ly on his blog. There are dozens of url shortening options on the web these days, all taking from the good idea that tinyurl started. And they all do a pretty good job of shortening urls quickly and easily. But bit.ly is thinking a lot about publishers in their approach to building out their service. If you visit my political post from early this week and then click the bit.ly bookmarklet, you’ll see this list of places that post has gone. You can see that 194 people on twitter clicked thru to that post with bit.ly, eight did it on facebook, four did it on netvibes, etc, etc. That’s very useful information for a publisher and getting publishers interested in bit.ly will get them using it and possibly providing a way to monetize it, something that has eluded the url shortening category to date.
That click tracking picture reminds me of another of our portfolio companies, Tumblr. When David and Marco built Tumblr, they built it from day one with both the publisher/blogger and the reader in mind. You don’t just blog/create content in Tumblr, you also consume it there. The Tumblr dashboard is a very simple and elegant "rss reader" but they don’t call it that. But in keeping with "serve both the publisher and reader" mantra, the dashboard is also where you go to find out how people are consuming and engaging with your content. On the right is a screen shot of the way tumblr readers engaged with the kozmo photo I blogged at fredwilson.vc yesterday. Right from the dashboard that I use follow what other people I care about are saying and doing on tumblr, I can see how people have reacted to what I have done. It’s a great example of the power of social media in action.
Any post on this topic by me would be remiss if it didn’t at least mention friendfeed and twitter. Both have tabs that let me focus on how people are enaging with my content. The reply tab on twitter does that for me and the "me" tab on friendfeed (or the "my feed" page in the new beta version of friendfeed) also does that for me. That said, I think both services could do a much better job of surfacing what people are doing and saying with my content. Twitter can’t tell me (at least I don’t think they can) how many people favorited one of my tweets, how many retweeted, how many people clicked on a link in one of my tweets, etc, etc. And I have not been able to figure out how to just see all the comments people have left for me on friendfeed. So both of those services could improve the way they service the publisher in my opinion.
We are at an interesting point in the world of media. Bloggers and every day people are creating more and more relevant content that mainstream people are consuming. But big media companies are seeing the power of social media and they are engaging with the very same services more and more every day. This is mashing up and mixing up the concept of the publisher and the reader. And so services that do the same by focusing on both of them at the same time are going to prosper.
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Comments (Archived):
“You have to build a service with the user/reader in mind or you won’t get any uptake. But if you can’t engage the content creator in your service, you’ll lose something important”what’s most interesting about this thought – which clearly I agree with and in fact we look for and build services that support the notion – is that it implicitly acknowledges that the line between content consumption and creation (i.e, publisher and reader) is blurred, maybe to the point where the distinction no longer matters. Instead, more interesting value is being created by services which take new ways of looking at content, from the perspective not of the originator (or owner) of the content, but by its velocity, its movement, its consumption patterns.So tremendous value can be created by looking at and building applications that, as you say, serve both sides of the equation because that’s where the action is occurring.
“content” is no more than a trigger on a shotgun … it is not the message anymore, but a catalyst. the conversation is the blog, or what used to be called content.the actual value now comes from what is done with comments, with aggregation of meaning, with an analysis of summize, for example.implications are everything. meaning has returned to center stage
“Instead, more interesting value is being created by services which take new ways of looking at content, from the perspective not of the originator (or owner) of the content, but by its velocity, its movement, its consumption patterns.”I think this touches on the notion that data is a commodity; it’s increasingly abundant. Umair talks about this quite a bit. What’s creating the most value (now and especially in the future) are the services that “amplify the flow of data” — not the stock:http://www.bubblegeneration…http://conversationhub.com/…
Umair explained that to me over lunch earlier this year and its one of the big insights of the year for me
I couldn’t agree more.I think the “catering to the publisher” mentality also eliminates one of the inherent risks in creating a “social” or community powered web app. The problem with many of these sites is the whole chicken & the egg issue — how was Digg valuable before it had traffic, how did it get traffic before publishers deemed it valuable? That’s tough nut to crack for an entrepreneur.What many sites do is try to create a “utility” first – for example, Delicious was valuable even for that very first user. If nobody else was on Delicious I’d still use it for book marking stuff I found on the web and didn’t want to lose on my hard drive or when I switched PC’s. The service became even more valuable when more people got on it, but it was a utility first and social application second. The same with YouTube. That site could’ve done nothing else at the beginning but give me a place to upload and store my own videos and I would’ve found it to be useful.So I think if more web services come at the ‘chicken & the egg’ problem from the perspective of, “How can I make my service valuable for one single users and nobody else”, they’ll dramatically increase their chances of success and mitigate a lot of the risk that comes from building community applications on the web.
Insightful as usual Fred. I’d suggest that the most profound change agents of the future will be the non-tech folks that until recently (and even now) struggle to get their appropriate share of voice. Blogs are more tech-centric than real life but this will smooth out over time. Another factor is that there are signs that women will soon overwhelm men in terms of online content production – this will shift the mix of content as well.
It’s “eluded” not “alluded”
OopsThanks, I’ll make that correction
I completely agree that the democratization of content creation at the same time as the large media companies have embraced the power of social media creates new opportunities for web services businesses that cater to both. What’s also interesting to note is that so far most of these efforts have been focused on new reader acquisition; i.e. by distributing content and/or referencing how and with whom that content has been shared – the originator stands to attract new readers.But what about retention-focused web services that cater to publishers and readers? Are there ways to motivate readers to return and re-engage with the originator after the point of initial consumption?
This is also an important lesson for enterprise/internal developers. Things taken for granted on the “web” are still only beginning to make their way into corporations, and the change that readers are also contributors, that comments are valuable, and that an extremely complex, unfriendly and workflow-centric process for creating and publishing content in many corporations is strangling their own “social” and “collaborative” initiatives.At the same time, most consumer companies are not offering their products for corporate consumption – I would have loved to show disqus to my customers and users. Google sees this space as an opportunity by continuously adding features to its Google Apps offering. (They recently added a version of youtube to share videos within an organization.)I understand that for many companies adding corporate-centric sales would require significant additional sales resources and perhaps a change in the focus, but would notthat create an opportunity for VCs to invest in spin-offs or entities that license technology but specialize in creating white-label corporate offerings based on that technology?ps. sorry if this is a bit rambling.
This part of your post really strikes me as important – “big media companies are seeing the power of social media and they are engaging with the very same services more and more every day. This is mashing up and mixing up the concept of the publisher and the reader. And so services that do the same by focusing on both of them at the same time are going to prosper.”The question is, where do we find these people that have these ideas, and get them moving?
It’s very slick and I really like the slim banner across the top of the pageas the UI