I once had the pleasure of being in a lecture with Vint Cerf at the podium in Sydney. He was fascinated by his observations and predictions about the Internet. One comment stuck with me in particular: the Internet was created as a place without borders, and this was deliberate.
The Internet Was Built Without Borders
The people behind the creation of the Internet knew that the only limitation to the information shared between people is the networks they're connected to. Even HTML, arguably one of the most important steps toward the setup of the World Wide Web, was written around the idea of linking people's content. The motivation at the time may have been to share research documents, but the fundamental idea was the setup of anchors between nodes: links between pages.
Content Has Become Infinitely Reproducible
Since then, more than a trillion of unique URLs have been created (source: Google, 2008). Streams of content — video, text, images — are created daily from millions of sources. The web is growing at a rapid pace, and with new platforms, duplicating content has become easy. There's a real distinction between quality, unique content and recycled or low-value content, but the underlying fact remains: most content on the Internet is free.
This was planned from the very beginning, but the trend is most visible now given the technologies that allow it. At a time when everyone is trying to make their website, video, or content "viral," a glaring theme has emerged:
You cannot control what happens to the content you create on the Internet. Unlike traditional media, Internet users can view, copy, share, discuss, and criticize other people's content. All of it happens at lightning speed.
The rise of websites like these is built on exactly that premise: users being able to link to, view, discuss, and share other people's content.
- WordPress
- Digg
Publishing and Distribution: The Two Halves of Content
There are different types of content, but one thing holds true across all of it: content has two parts: publishing and distribution. Over time, as more content gets published, services that help people search for and consume that content emerge. That consumption itself involves distribution and the creation of more related content. For example, watching a YouTube video, sharing it on Twitter, and then having your followers' comment on it.
Why Content Has Become a Commodity
With so much content being published and distributed every second, the value of that content comes into question. There are visible signs that content, while king in many aspects, is easily devalued online.
Take music, for example. Even the honest user who sees value in buying songs online can do so for as little as 99 US cents. A very different proposition from the physical album era, when albums and record titles usually guaranteed the artist and producers at least $10 USD per album. That's on top of pirated downloads, which anecdotally far outweigh legal downloads in most countries. The shift toward selling songs rather than albums, while innovative and a step in the right direction, hasn't been the complete solution the music industry has been searching for.
Take news websites, too. One of the biggest discussion points on the Internet is how to monetize traditional media online. Some of the biggest players on the Internet, including Google and Apple, are working to strike out deals with publishers to shift them away from their old way of thinking. Online advertising rates aren't as lucrative for many media houses compared to offline rates, and with increased competition online and reduced offline readership, they're struggling. Creating content isn't the main challenge for readership retention anymore. A user can access the same information from multiple sources through search engines.
Content has become a commodity with largely no real value by itself. What value does it have existed either in individual valuation (a user willing to pay for a song or movie) or in aggregate (a premium price for a quality news website).
User Experience Is What's Left When Content Alone Isn't Enough
All hope isn't lost. Where content is a commodity, another trend is emerging user experience is starting to play the most critical role in the online world. The Internet is now a platform for users to interact with each other as well as with your tool, platform, or media house, and that experience is becoming critical.
Interaction and engagement shouldn't be taken lightly. Your website and online presence need to account for why people will come back. What are users going to take away, and what will make them want to return? Your core value proposition isn't simply the content you offer anymore.
These experiences can take different forms:
- Visual
- Communal
- Interactive (games, for example)
- Personal
In almost all of these, content is one factor among many, but certainly not the only one. If your website design is an eyesore, a user will close it within seconds without bothering to read the text.
With the presence of content aggregators today, the same content is shared and offered by multiple providers in different forms. Online websites and social media let users create, play, read, and ignore content at will. This points to a clear opportunity: the way a user builds or becomes part of online communities, engages with websites, and, most importantly, sees value in their online experience becomes the core of what brings them back.
Building Experience Through Competition and Positive Reinforcement
Competition and positive reinforcement are one way to build a quality experience. Online experiences that introduce competition in subtle, non-traditional ways tend to win, through reputation scores, the number of friends or connections a user is associated with or simply having the "coolest" profile online. Where possible, there are no "losers" in these scenarios, and that positive reinforcement forms a positive experience of the time spent on a website.
These experiences must be innovative and build a genuine thread of importance and connection for the visiting user. Only after that challenge is addressed does it make sense to think about monetization and transactions.
This pattern is almost constant among Silicon Valley-backed startups. Facebook and Twitter are classic examples of companies that spend more time raising money to get the website and experience right than to monetize from day one, and their investors clearly agreed with that approach. This doesn't have to be true for everyone, but it underscores the importance of end-user experience.
How the Big Players Are Approaching Experience
Existing online giants are also looking closely at user experience, albeit in different ways:
- Yahoo! is using its vast resources to focus on behavioural targeting, displaying relevant advertisements for specific users. Here, the experience lives in the advertisements themselves, tailored not just to content but to how a user has navigated the website. This builds greater ad appreciation among users, and a higher dollar return per ad for the client.
- Google takes a somewhat different approach, spending heavily on Chrome (both browser and operating system) and mobile, aiming to customise the user's experience regardless of the medium they use to access and view content. The goal is the same — make users happy and encourage them to search more, driving greater search revenue.
Why is "Web 3.0"?
Vint Cerf, in that same lecture, said the Internet is naturally evolving at a rapid pace. Note the word "naturally," not in discrete versions like 1.0, 2.0, and so on. I agree with him, but I've used "3.0" in the title deliberately, to point out that this trend of content-as-commodity will stay with the web through its next cycle of natural evolution.
The Takeaway
Focusing on what users come to your website is well and good. But most people and organisations succeeding online today already have a reasonable understanding of this. They realise, sometimes inadvertently, that beyond the quality of their content, how they keep users there is what's most critical to their online success.
"Disruptive technology" is a phrase heard frequently in the Indian digital and software space. No doubt, various disruptive approaches — some already emerged; others yet to follow — will allow all of us to better leverage the value of our content.
You may also like this