How to Dominate Media/Web 2.0 (Special Edition)
"...Mr. Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that Mr. Braun oversees, made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them."
Link.
Wow, what a
huge coincidence: Semel's 'pillars' are basically exactly the three economies I've been talking about for a looong time now, and which are spelled out in more than a little detail in
my ppts.
Now, leaving the not-so-amazing coincidence aside for a sec, and also leaving aside for a sec the issue of whether Yahoo can execute (dubious, I know), it's pretty cool for the ideas in my work to get this kind of validation.
These 'pillars' are really the fundamental strategic point of all three of my ppts: vertical integration is the dominant Media/Web 2.0 strategy. Why? Because you can realize all three 2.0 economies that way:
1) Network economies dominate search.
2) Viral economies dominate microcontent/communities.
3) Distributed economies dominate personalization/microchunking.
The point is that if you can put all three together, you realize a *huge* scale advantage, because you're realizing nonlinear returns to scale along all three dimensions.
In fact, winning plays can even maximize returns along one or two dimensions in specific verticals (EG Become - viral/network economies for product reviews; SideStep - network economies for travel search); incumbents should be looking to maximize across all three (viz, Google is killer at extending network economies across domains, but notably poor at viral and distributed economies; Yahoo is mediocre at best across all three).
This is what the 2.0 Strategy Space slide below means, and what my
latest ppt is about. I think it's a cool way to quickly analyze which Web/Media 2.0 plays are going to be winners; looks like other folks are beginning to agree, whether or not they give me props when maybe they should.
(Link via Nivi).