Seth Godin, Micro-Magazines & the Future of Media
Posted on 06. May, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized
Today Seth Godin reacted to the pending sale of Newsweek and asked the question regarding media: “Is there a business here?”
He answers yes, but he defines a new form, the “micro magazine,” as the spot where future success lies:
While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that’s awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me.
What’s a micro-magazine? He goes on to define it as:
- Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
- Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
- Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail
In other words he sees a future for media of many properties each going after very specific topics and audiences. Those audiences are contributors of content themselves. But the submissions go beyond just tweets and have longer form style.
And he’s bullish on this format:
There’s room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines . . . expect that once someone figures out how to be the voice of a tribe, the revenue will take care of itself.
Relevance: Social vs. Topic Networks
Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized
Above is a recent post on Facebook from a friend of mine. It’s typical of the sort of posts that used to illicit a lot of skepticism when people first considered getting on to MySpace, Facebook and then Twitter. “Why would I get on ?” they would say. “I don’t care to read about what my friend is having for lunch / what clothes they are wearing / what they weather is like where they live / etc.”
Folks used to say that, but they’d still get on those services. And they might have been skeptical, but boy did they start using those services anyhow. The ability of those services to allow users “to say in touch” with friends has been phenomenal, and millions upon millions of users spend amazing amounts of time contributing and reading brief posts from their friends about meals, interesting links, runs, baby photos, you name it. (Of course there are differences between MySpace (stalking), Facebook and Twitter (asynchronous, not just social), but I’m talking broadly about the social network phenomena).
Seeing the great success of social networks among friends, many businesses sought to insert similar networks into other sectors of life. LinkedIn has been a runaway success as a “professional social network.” It, however, is primarily used as a directory of people, resumes and connections, and has not come close to Facebook’s success in terms of getting users to come back regularly to consume new content.
Ning has been the leader in “white labeled” social networks that allow users to create a social network for any interest or topic. There are numerous other white label network offerings as well. Ning launched into our industry amid a LOT of buzz–it has raised $120 million from some top flight investors. But Ning and other white label social networks have never gained much traction and just recently news has come out that Ning is really hurting (and from people we know who used to be there, it’s even worse).
So what happened? Why wasn’t the success of social networks able to translate into lots of successful, topic-focused, white label networks. The answer is that content in a social context has different relevance than content in a topic-based context.
Mark Zuckerberg has always had the genius of looking to simply model in technology what is already happening in the real world. And in the real world, communication in a friendship context is casual, it’s short-form, it’s “small talk.” Because of the context of the existing relationship you already have with a friend, you are eager to simply “catch up” and “stay in touch” and the small, pedestrian details of what is going on in that person’s life are interesting to you because that person is your friend. There’s no need for moderation: you welcome that user’s content into your feed because they are your friend.
Social networks–and Facebook most successfully–were created to enable that friendship communication. The tools set up–photo sharing, and in particular the status update–enable just that friendship interaction. The result are posts like my friends above about cleaning his kitchen floor, and millions upon millions of us find this interesting.
Now Ning and the other white-labeled networks saw the success of MySpace and Facebook and built their systems off those models (in particular they’re built off of MySpace which was the market leader at the time). But here’s the disconnect: the friendship content model was being jammed on top of the topic content dynamic.
And let’s look back to the real world. When you are communicating in a topic (not friendship) context, the communication is much different. If you are learning more about a personal passion, say gardening, or are communicating on a professional topic like human resources best practices, the remarks are much more likely to be prepared and of high quality. Often you’d be at a meeting or a convention where selected speakers present prepared remarks or speak through a moderated panel. Importantly, there is a higher bar for quality and relevance in order for the content to be meaningful to you.
If you’re interested in gardening, you don’t want to hear an update from a gardening expert saying “I just got back from walking my dog.” You’d like to hear an insightful post from them on good tips for planting in the spring. But the systems created by Ning and the other white label providers steer the content and communication into that short-form, social-network-like format. And that’s why they’ve fallen down.
But some Internet pioneers have taken another tact. These are sites like BleacherReport (sports), SeekingAlpha (finance), etc. who have looked to cover their topics through a community of contributors. But they understood that using Ning or the social network model would not provide the quality needed for “topic-focused” communication. While borrowing some social networks conventions, they took the blog post as the core content type for their sites. And then to further enhance quality, they used human editors / moderators / curators to direct and filter their communities’ contributions. The result has been great success for this new breed of “crowdsourced publisher.”
It took a lot of (venture capitalist) money for these sites to get to where they are, as existing CMS systems do not provide for this crowdsourced model and all of them had to build their own proprietary systems (BleacherReport has raised $8 million and SeekingAlpha $7 million). In order for more sites to benefit from this phenomena without having to spend the millions to build it all themselves, Grogger provides a platform where any publisher–whether media, brand or association–can easily launched a crowdsourced site.
So the riddle has been solved! The social network model works for social content. For topic-based content, it’s part social network, part blog, and part curation. And it’s all ready to go on Grogger. So start a grog!
GDGT–Crowdsourced Electronics Content
Posted on 07. Apr, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry, Uncategorized
GDGT, a site that produces crowdsourced electronics content–closed a new round of funding today. From the WSJ:
Gdgt is one of a lengthening list of businesses built on the belief that real people can deliver better content than editors or generalist reporters. These companies, like sports site SB Nation or more general question-and-answer service Quora, are tapping the social-networking zeitgeist by relying on their users to generate content and using data like one’s social connections and targeted interests to better personalize it.
Grogger Product Video
Posted on 03. Mar, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized
Made this video today for a conference application. It gives an overhaul of what grogs do an why.
Please let me know what you think.
AOL Investing Big in Crowdsourced Content
Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized
Headline on TechCrunch today: AOL To Pour $50 Million Into Patch This Year. They are focusing in a big way on crowdsourced content, in particular in Patch on local crowdsourced content.
We’re very impressed with AOL and their leadership and new strategy. I think it will work out well.
They’ll have a lot of competitors in doing what they’re doing. For these competitors, however, it will be critical to have the right platform so that they can compete. Fortunately we’re here!
Couldn’t Have Said It Better Ourselves
Posted on 01. Mar, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized
Here’s an email today from a newly minted grogger:
Its a pleasure to be one of the first users of Grogger, the concept is very interesting and promising to say the least.
I was recently starting up a new blog, located at [blah blah] . Then I read about Grogger on TechCrunch, about a day after I started setting up [my new blog] and thought to my self ‘This is what I always wanted, but have been too lazy to dabble with Wordpress and phpBB to get to’. So why not try and ask the kind folks at Grogger if they would let me test the software?
In short, the idea for [my blog] is a site dedicated to [blah blah]. The original idea was for a blog where the admin/admins would write up posts on various ideas, see what the commenters had to say about it then allow the ones with even better ideas and a good command of English to join the ranks.
Grogger allows for a more easy to manage and fluid operation of this concept. What I plan on doing with Grogger for now is explore the possibilities. I’ll initially go for a blog/forum cross, a sort of super-moderated forum where every new thread has to be accepted by admins before it is added. Grogger’s blog-like presentation will allow for a more unique display of all the ‘threads’.
The Power of the Passed Link
Posted on 01. Mar, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized
On the web today are two little blurbs about the power of passed links.TechCrunch notes:
The other reason Google needed to establish its own social stream [Buzz] pronto is that links passed through social sharing are beginning to rival search as a primary driver of traffic for many sites. Part of Google’s prowess stems from the fact that it is the largest referrer of traffic to many other Websites. It doesn’t want to lose that status to social sharing streams such as Facebook or Twitter
We’ve spent some time recently looking at how Facebook has become a bigger driver of traffic to online news than news portals like MyYahoo or Google News, and our initial suspicionswere confirmed with some data by the folks at HitWise
These are far from the first posts on this dynamic and they won’t be the last. But the implications are huge.
SEO has long been the dominant tactic of any site to grow traffic. But now passed links—in particular for more dynamic, real-time sites (think media instead of reference, i.e. Wikipedia)—are steadily becoming a bigger factor. This is a sea change and it will be vitally important for publishers to react and optimize their sites for this new web dynamic.
Needless to say, we think that Grogger is the best way to become a social publisher, with an audience that is really engaged with–and sharing links to–your content.
UPDATE: Responding to Idary’s comment:
Hell yeah, Grogger is all about getting such links going.
We start by encouraging users to sign in via social networks:
Then once logged in, we make it easy for them to send out links to those networks with every action they take:
So we make it technically very easy to produce links.
But more importantly, because users feel the community and ownership over the content in a way unique to the crowdsourcing ethos we produce with our customers, they want to share those links.
We Got Crunched
Posted on 26. Feb, 2010 by Toby in Uncategorized
So on Wednesday TechCrunch did a post on us (Thanks Mike, Jason!). It was great. The response was overwhelming.
Overwhelmingly good in terms of all of the exposure, great reaction, and lots of inquiries we received.
But for our systems, the response just simply overwhelming. Here’s the view from Google Analytics:
We weren’t prepared for such an on-rush, and unfortunately we had to go back into private beta for a bit. Thank you very much to all of those who tried to start a grog but were shut out. We are furiously working away on our systems and will open back to you soon.
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