The Death of the Secret Garden

So just to re-cap we have been working out how to evolve present day web1.0 flat classified models into web2.0 networking affected juggernauts. Everyone is still hyper because News Corp bought MySpace but even though MySpace has millions of users and adds users quickly the site has no clear commercial path other than advertising space and this is getting rather boring and the greatest portion of MySpace’s users are about 17. So there is great opportunity to sell ring tones and MP3 music but every site and their mother is going to be fighting it out for these transactions and it is not going to be easy. Does anyone even click on banners anymore?

I would personally give 10% of the MySpace business to Apple and in exchange for revenue share on I-Tunes purchases via MySpace.

Now another interesting tid bit I have come across is that News Corp is planning to buy Monster. I would describe this as the stupidest deal ever to be done should it happen because either Google or disinter-mediated recruiters are going to put the job advertisements up for free. As a recruiter why would you spend $250K on posting jobs when you could go into partnership with three to five other recruiters and spend $30K a year? They can even contribute to an advertising fund and save money. However, after seeing News spend $600m for MySpace, I would be lining up to sell them anything. Hey News I have some swamp land in Florida for you. It’s nice but a few big storms come through every year but don’t worry about that!

Now back to the matter at hand. I have recently begun evolving a flat auto classified business in Australia into at least a web1.5 - 2.0 business. They key factors we are after are trust and participation by users. In Australia, auto classifieds spend a great deal of money on auto data – and with users adding and changing and commenting on posts and other participatory items we can limit this spend and create much more compelling content at the same time. At the same time this additional real estate creates an upsell for advertisers in the form of very targeted ad space.

The other big consideration and there is a lot of detail around all of these things is classification, search, ad serving, tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies – in a very important way these things are all dependent on each other. How to mature from taxonomy to folksonomy is a big question and whether or not to even do this is a big issues because we have already trained people that cars work via make and model aka a fixed taxonomy. Much like the way Google has taught us all that single words find everything on the net. I won’t tell you what I think but I will eventually give you a link to the finished product.

The process of evolution and (or) commercialization is not simple and many companies will end up throwing buckets of money to try to capitalize on the networking effect. My advice is create sections of your site which are “web2.0,” run your “old school” models in parallel and leverage the user created content as an upsell for advertisers and learn to embrace negative content. You cannot protect advertisers from negative content if you truly want to leverage the network effect. Artificially removing and or preventing negative content will only make the site seem contrived and this will alienate users, reduce the trust quotient, reduce participation and remove the opportunity for advertiser up sell.