What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [18]
At a conference of media bigwigs in London in 2007, I got into an amicable debate about Google’s model of distribution with my friend and former colleague Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations at The New York Times Company. I was urging the 200-plus worldwide media executives there to think like Google—that was the first time I publicly suggested that we should be asking, WWGD? I advised them to follow Google’s example and distribute themselves as widely as possible, to go to where the readers are rather than make the readers come to them. Nisenholtz argued in response that some brands, such as The Times, are worth the trip to their site. He’s right. But The Times is also worth distributing.
At that same conference, two brilliant consultants—Jeffrey Rayport of Harvard Business School and Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News—advised the executives to turn their media properties “inside-out,” inviting audiences in. They were half right. The problem with this formulation is that it still puts the media companies inside, at the center. That’s not how their customers think of their worlds. People draw their me-spheres with themselves at the center and everyone else—especially those who want their money—on the outside. That’s how companies and institutions should view themselves: on the outside, asking to come in.
“We can’t expect consumers to come to us,” is how the president of CBS Interactive, Quincy Smith, put it to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.” Smith abandoned his network’s strategy of creating a destination site where viewers would come to see its shows. He joked that the address for that failed portal should have been “CBS.com/nobodycomeshere.” In its place, Smith developed a strategy built around the audience as the network, placing shows on as many sites and platforms as possible, making them embeddable, and hoping that people would distribute them farther. So far, it’s working.
Enabling embedding gives networks something better than distribution. It gives them recommendations. If I put a clip of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on my blog, I’m recommending that you watch it. Even if I criticize the show, I’m saying there’s something here worth seeing and discussing. You can watch it right then and there, without having to seek out Comedy Central.com. Such audience network strategies make viewers both distributors and marketers and get content into the wider conversation. When it works, viral distribution by the public can be more effective and certainly a lot cheaper than marketing to attract an audience.
The audience can also sell. In BarnesAndNoble.com’s affiliate program, anyone can become a bookseller on a blog by adding a widget that recommends titles. If readers buy, the blogger earns a commission of 6 percent. It’s no way to get rich but it does provide one more motivation for customers to become distributors and marketers. Bookstores are not alone. Search Google for any of many categories followed by the words “affiliate program” and you’ll be surprised at the thousands that are happy to share revenue for selling gifts, flowers, shoes, insurance, Bibles, and, of course, porn. Retail, like search and content, can think distributed.
Newspaper classifieds were once the epitome of a centralized marketplace: You had to go to the paper to sell or buy a car or a home or find a job or an employee because that’s where everyone did business. There was no other way for buyer and seller to find each other. Then came the internet and craigslist, whose founder, Craig Newmark, is blamed for sucking billions of dollars out of the newspaper industry. That’s unfair. He simply created a tool that makes markets more efficient, leaving