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June 01, 2005
Community, not Content, Is King
We presented at IBD Network's Under the Radar Conference today in Mountain View, CA. There were about 200 or so people present, mostly VCs and entrepreneurs. It was focused on consumer technologies, so there was a mix of social software and mobile content plays. I saw some interesting companies such as Rojo, FiveAcross, PubSub, PeerFlix, among others.
I was surprised to see a number of mobile content plays. It looks like history is about to repeat itself. The mobile market seems to be following the same patterns of the Internet, when everyone originally thought content was king. People ended up balking to pay for content on the Internet, but have been more than willing to pay to connect to other people through sites such as Ebay, Match.com, Hotjobs, etc. - proving that community or social interaction, not content is king.
I think we will find the same conclusion with the mobile market as well. Who is going to pay to watch a movie on their cell phone, particularly when we have plasma, LCD, and flat screen TVs that make watching TV the traditional way a vastly superior experience. Yet, the reason so many companies are focused on mobile content is that carriers are desperately seeking more ways to monetize their user base. This is the old solution looking for a problem issue and history has proved that those ideas never work. Content is often overvalued because it is a commodity.
On the flip slide, social interaction will never be commoditized. Every interaction you have is different and unique. It is always changing. There is always something new to talk about because our lives are always changing, providing an endless stream of topics to discuss. So, anyone looking for the next big thing to hit the mobile market, or any market, think about if it promotes interaction among people and if it does, then ask how it makes that interaction better than what we currently have. Ebay brought buyers and sellers together from around the world for the first time providing a global flea market. Who will be the next ebay? How will it connect people together? How will it improve the experience of being connected to someone else? How will it raise the bar? How will it move the conversation further or deeper?
Almost 2500 years ago, Plato was writing about how humans were social animals. While the world around us has changed a lot since then, the fact that we still need to interact with others is still a constant that will remain at least another 2500 years, while most of the content we now have has long been forgotten.
Posted by Charles at June 1, 2005 01:29 AM