In part one of this post, I discussed a desired future state where all my (your) contacts, thoughts, messages and posts would reside within a hub. A hub that would greatly simplify the creating and sending of content as well as the intake.
Next I’ll tackle the revenue options for such a technology/business model as well as what I’m going to do until those models come to fruition.
Why Revenue?
The revenue question is a biggie in my future vision because of the revenue models of today. Namely: eyeballs. The advertisers that support MySpace, Facebook, and all the rest, are paying for access to the users of those sites. If those users stop visiting, there won’t be any reason to advertise on the sites.
In my vision, I will no longer visit MySpace and Facebook on a day-to-day basis., Once I have my profile set-up, I wouldn’t need to visit those places unless I want too. These simply become nodes in a vast network that serves as a path – both into and out of – my hub.
On the surface, this is not a good thing for MySpace and Facebook. But there are three alternatives: fees, paid advertising and web services.
Three Solutions
1. I would gladly pay a fee to have such a hub. I’d pay $10 to $12 per year, or even per month for something this useful. In this model, the “Hub provider” would share some of their revenue with the sites I trafficked. In fact, it may end up that all of them charge small access fees in addition to advertising (there will be some eyeballs).
2. The second idea is paid advertising, but not in the same sense as today. What if advertisers supported my hub activity to get to my network? In this model, I would select advertisers that I believe in and their ads would be embedded in my output. No matter if it’s an e-mail to one person or a blog post to the entire network, the advertising message would go to them all. This would be very attractive to advertisers because it would be targeted and permission based. The people in my hub would expect ads and would be inclined to read them because I chose them. The key isn’t me – I’m nothing special – the key is people’s interest in what their friends and associates are into. One last note on this: I would like this much more than the “targeted” ads triggered from key words on a web page. Just ‘cause I write about men doesn’t mean I’m talking about Viagra. Get my point?
3. In a terrific post entitled, The Future is Web Services, Not Websites, Steve Rubel suggests the third way a hub could work. Mash his idea and mine together and you get a hub that’s built from a collection of web services and widgets from MySpace and Facebook. The core functionality would be separate from those sites, but they would provide the interactivity gateways in a branded and advertising supported way.
Which is somewhat related to what I’m going to do today.
While I’m Waiting
As I mentioned here, I’m working to simplify my online life. This means reducing the complexity of juggling multiple sites as well as web page design. Multiple site juggling speaks for itself and my web page design complexity is because of my inability to build a web site that fully communicates all that I am. I have great ideas, but since I’m not a coder and barely proficient at HTML, I don’t have TIME to make them happen (I don’t have the skill either…).
So my solution is to tackle both at once by relying more on “off the shelf” solutions for my online life. And though this may actually increase the number of sites I interact with, in the end, I’ll get what I want much quicker.
For instance, I’m in the process of building out a new Netvibes site using their new Ginger platform. Ginger has a robust set of widgets that allow you to build a multi-layered site with tabs, feeds, pages and written content. Rather than have my “About” content on page two of this site, I’ll send people there. You can watch it come together here.
Another example is Squidoo. I already have a few pages that contain resources for Why I Failed.com. I’ll probably build more, link to them from here, but also include them in my Netvibes home. I’m also open to other easy page building sites like Google just released.
The only danger I see is visitor fatigue because of the multiple formats for presenting my content. I’m hoping people will adjust, see it as an experiment and go with the flow.
None of this solves my biggest issue about efficiently creating and sending content, but I’ll have to wait for that.
Let me know your thoughts.
