Found via Tech Crunch, here are VC’s Fred Wilson’s six words to live by on the Internet: Global, social, open, mobile, playful, intelligent — and a bonus seventh one: instantaneous.
Not quite “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but true words indeed.
This begs the question, how do these words apply to content?
- Global: unlike local TV, web video has, in the words of Jack Welch, a “boundary-less” audience. Your content can cover a very local topic but if you can wrap it up in a global context, you will get a better ROI, because more people will consume and volume will drive revenues.
- Social: Video is infinitely more valuable than text content because of the sharing and commenting aspects of the medium. If you think about it, advertisers are starting to look increasingly at “time spent on a site” over pageviews. Yet “time spent on a site” is oftentimes amplified not by the time one spends strictly consuming the content, but the commenting on it. Go to any Youtube video page and see how many of the same users go back to the same page to comment on it. For better or worse, that increases time spent on the site, making the content more valuable.
- Open: YouTube sold for $1.65B mainly for its ability to make video “explode” by popularizing the embed function, something that Adobe’s flash enabled but founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley learned at Paypal, whose payment buttons proliferated all over the Web.
- Mobile: strictly speaking, this refers to mobile as in wireless devices… but broadly speaking, this includes creating videos that are valuable enough to be on every platform: web, wireless, television and out of home (a market we now reach nearly 20,000,000 consumers each month). But, of course, this also means being able to let consumers take your video and take it where they want. This last part is something that freaks out traditional media, and allows new media producers like WatchMojo.com to leverage to disrupt the content business.
- Playful: Put simply, to quote Johnny Carson, “People will pay more to be entertained than educated”…
- Intelligent: … but that being said, so much of the value of content is derived from others’ (be it readers/viewers/listeners, employees, investors, and mainly advertisers) desire to be associated to it, and one’s desire to be associated to something/someone else is based on how intelligent its perception is. One of the growing markets we see (but rarely talk about) is the educational market. We have about a dozen or so educational organizations that license our content for their academic clients/needs. This in of itself translates to little financially right now, but it does suggest that the content is intellligent enough to make others (advertisers) want to associate themselves to it.
- Instantaneous: Like I tell my team, online, you can’t wait for things to be perfect, you have to put it out there and then continuously improve the quality, quantity, frequency, and consistency. But once something is out there, the impact is usually instantaneous, so make sure you pour everything you have in the content before it goes out there.
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