OpenMobile

AdverBlog: Music to my ears.

We already discussed advergaming titled " Yo! you wanna play"? in a previous entry, now lets talk adverblogs! By every indication the model of having "non-professionals" write about their passion and aggregating it in one place on the Internet opens doors to significant advertising revenue.

The central premise here is that that if you are passionate about something, there are at least a few thousand people out there, who share your passion. Which simply means that if you love grandfather clocks and you love writing about them and reading about them and subscribing to publications that cover grandfather clocks, then be sure that there are other like you. To wax philosophical here, humans are not that different from each other. (Considering we share 99% of the human genome how different could we really be?) That doesn’t mean that the 1% doesn’t account for a lot of variety- it certainly does. I mean I am nothing like Shaq, but still we are bound by a common fate. I digress but only to make a point.

Now, take music for example. There are literally thousands of varieties of musical forms and forms of musical entertainment and there are always a bunch of people that like one form of it over another. Some like Rock, some like pop, some like French Hip-Hop (I do), some like Mississippi Delta Blues (moi), some like it live, some recorded, some like to download it to their ipods, some like to rip it, burn it and play it, some like to buy CD’s, some like to watch Music Videos- you get the idea. During my travels in Morocco, we listened to the “latest pop hit in Morocco” and what to me sounded like donkeys wailing – but Moroccans absolutely loved it! I didn’t but there were millions of Moroccans who absolutely loved this stuff – my point exactly. Having established that – we look at the common forums for discussing your musical interests. How about Apple creating an iTunes blog? Why not? I mean there are millions of people coming to your site to download music – something that they are incredibly passionate about. (In the words of one of my favorite cousins “ Dude Coldplay is the greatest band EVER and “Scientist”? Oh my god it is the greatest song ever. I love it. It is absolutely sick!”) And what’s more? You can even pay the writers/contributors. Do you think iTunes will have a problem generating an audience for this “megablog”? I doubt it.

The real question then becomes, one, can I (posturing as Apple Inc.) make a profit on this? The answer is an emphatic yes. How? Well, lets see. Ever heard of Advertising revenues? And with Apple’s brand equity, fuhggedaboutit (did I spell that right?). The next question is for the blogger to ask herself  “Can I write enough and compellingly enough that I can buy my groceries from the blog income?” The answer here, as well, is yes. In fact I have spoken with many who actually make a nice little income on the side on blogging. So, in effect, bloggers are the new freelance writers. You know how freelance writers are portrayed –fairly accurately- in popular culture? This guy living in a rent control studio apartment in the cheapest (rent wise) neighborhoods in Manhattan, carrying a bunch of papers and books in his arms, wearing jeans and a hoodie- throw this image out. That’s done with. The post-Internet freelance writer is writing about what he is passionate about, who may not be technically brilliant, but has a lot of passion and he pours it out on his laptop and by extension on his blog. He “owns” the blog. He pulls his friends blog in to his (thank you RSS) and knows all about pageviews and online advertising models. This is the new freelance writer. Someone who is passionate about his or her interests or hobbies or opinions, and wants to share it with the world- and the Internet covers the world- at least the literate world.

(Disclaimer: I am currently involved with a Live Music related company here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that is driven by a passionate young guy and I am enjoying every bit of it. Consider me, in this instance a biased neutral- biased only by my evolving understanding of this whole new music thing.)

More to come….

Blog Aggregation...Come together! Right Now...

You remeber when Content Aggregation was a very active buzzword in late 90’s? Turns out, it has started happening. It's about time!  It has taken a very different form than you may have imagined years ago. The driver that is driving the change is the people who are producing content. Used to be content was created by “experts” in certain fields and there was a “technique” to it. Now, everyone is creating content and writing about whatever they feel passionate about with very little regard for the “skill” of writing. This is actually an outcome of the social networking trend, in my opinion. Social Networking has been adopted by hundreds of millions of people as a way to stay connected with people with similar interests, on the Internet and many smart companies (and some retailers) have found ways to enable this trend. People figured, if we are going to chat online, put our pictures up, make friends, then why not communicate our thoughts in a ‘one-to-many’ fashion? And it is practically free!

Just like my earlier entry where I talk about “Gaming Based Business Models” there are some very interesting models being explored to take advantage of the Blogging trend. Gather.com is a Boston based company that has a neat concept. Gather believes that if they can bring top bloggers in a variety of topics, it can generate a large user base and therefore a large audience, so the Blogger has access to a wider audience and probably gets to keep some of the ad revenues generated from contextual ads by Google’s AdSense or by Gather itself. 9Rules has a very similar model, which I won’t go into here, for it would be mostly repetitive.

The difference between community based content aggregation and top-down (if you will) content aggregation is that the top down model requires a lot of expensive marketing as well as heavy investments in technology for keeping control of what users can and cannot talk about. Top down models are also agenda based, as in, the ‘aggregator’ has an agenda that may not match the users’ agenda. Community based aggregation on the other hand is very simple. Use basic blog technology that is available for a fairly low price and then let your users do their thing! Turns out, there is no limit to the depth and the variety of human passion! Turns out, given a forum, people will talk about anything they are passionate about!

The irony of this whole thing is that the Internet tends to (and was supposed to) isolate people. This always conjured up an image for me- and it was an image of this kid in his basement “interacting with the computer” and totally ignoring her friends! Turns out, quite the opposite is happening. People are using the Internet to stay in closer contact with each other, talking more, sharing more, doing more, with each other.
For someone who has been closely involved in this whole process, this is a LOT of fun to watch and be a part of!

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

(I should have podcasted this one instead, but do you really want me singing?)