The internet is used for lots of spam, scams and tricks, which aim to make a quick buck and nothing else. Most tricks are easily seen through, however reckless they may be, and can be dealt with. There are also online businesses, which are less blatantly destructive than outright spam and scams, but yet fail to contribute constructively to what the internet is and could be.
By this I mean to hint at entrepreneurs (some even apparently successful) who dream of finding some magic way to repeat the ‘Google trick’, i.e. the golden solution, or more likely, a shortcut, to solve the problems of the net, and become the millionaires of tomorrow, like Larry Page and Sergei Brin did, when they launched Google, or more specifically, when they launched their Google Ads program.
Paradoxically, these are companies and entrepreneurs, who blindly go where others have gone before. They follow the latest trend, be it social software or video-blogging, in the hope of repeating the successes of those who went before, but without really thinking about internet users’ problems. What is at stake is money to be made on the traffic. By exploiting the vast masses of free information online in some way, one may earn a quick buck from all the ad clicks.
This model leads others, more careful types of entrepreneurs and businesses, to carefully seek to uphold and preserve intellectual rights (if any), or worse, to stay away completely from the internet as a serious avenue for business. By withholding and safeguarding information, if necessary with the help of Digital Rights Management (DRM), one can maintain greater value for those few, who can afford to obtain it. Theoretically, that is. This, of course, is the ‘Intellectual Property’-road of businesses of eons before us.
Guy Kawasaki talks here about making meaning for a business :
How does Kaplak want to make meaning? We want to make information make meaning.
We want to create sense in the world. In this sense, business secrecy (in the way of hiding information) makes little sense. It also makes little sense for us to decrease the value of our products for our customers, by adding technological restrictions which regulate their uses.
What we (and you, in your business) want to do is create value for customers and visitors, which make it worth their while to come by our particular spot and accept our particular offering.
This is quite different from tricks and ways to ‘figure it out’. Creating a surplus of value comes from hard, sustained efforts to deliver a service, which creates actual value in the other end of the economical food chain. This you can sell. Which makes your end of the food chain make money too.
There are no tricks to keep secret (at least, not forever) in a world abundant with information. Indeed a world in which the amount of accessible information increases exponentially each month, there is and will be a desperate need to make sense of all this information, in order to find anything.
The challenge we face, then, is how to create sense and surplus value, not in our end of the chain, but in our customer’s end.
One obvious way to do this in the information trade is to attribute greater value to the context of finding information, rather than on any particular piece of information. The strategy here is not to withhold information, but to create a valuable context, which makes it easy to get what you need. In this case, you’re willing to pay, because of the ease and comfort, by which you can obtain something, which would otherwise be a hazzle, and not the least, time-consuming and expensive.
I found this classic Disney cartoon on YouTube, which is a wonderful source for videos like this; short, classics, fun. It will no doubt later be removed by the YouTube admins at the request of the copyright owners, as I’ve experienced it countless times before with this kind of material, so enjoy it while you can. Thankfully, fans never cease to upload new versions of videos like this again later.
Let me take this opportunity to take a quick look at the landscape we meet today as cultural niche producers.
The merits of metadata
One of the great merits of YouTube has been to blur and erode the sharp distinctions of copyright on the internet. When I post the video above on this blog, the material is nowhere near the webservers, which host this site. It is all orchestrated by metadata, passing between our site, your computer and YouTube. Before YouTube, most would be very careful about posting a video like this on a website. Now, few would object to it. Piracy, as the entertainment industry defines it, has moved from underground p2p networks into the broad open.
Bittorrent index-sites such as The Pirate Bay has found the orchestration of metadata to be a powerful blow against the forces, who want to keep cultural distribution the way it’s always been. The torrent-files of the bittorrent protocol contain only metadata, which can be freely published and copied by anyone. The metadata consists of pointers to material on the user’s computers, exchanged only with other computers which ask for access to the material, using the client software, which reads the information contained in the torrents and takes care of orchestrating the traffic of the real data.
Thus, with their emphasis on metadata, services such as YouTube and decentralized distribution tools such as bittorrent has made it easy to distribute popular material without being hampered too much by copyright concerns. Finding this kind of stuff is easy, simply search for it, using the sites’ own built-in search mechanisms, or a general web search engine such as Google.
But it is not so easy, if you’re either looking for a product or material, which is less popular, or if you are a producer of a niche product looking for a solution to solve your distribution problems. First, you can only search for what you know about, and you must actively perform a search for it. Second, the niche producer must perform a great effort to make you as a customer “know” his product before you can search for it.
Google’s Ads
There are two solutions to this problem so far. The first is to use mass media-like advertising, on the web (banner ads) or in other media. The second is to use more direct marketing tools. In the latter category, Google has sought to refine current solutions elegantly, with their Google Ads offering. In short, Google’s ad program couples advertisers’ keywords (Adwords) with users’ searches as well as websites signing up for the ads (Adsense). This means that Google’s ads (theoretically) become far more meaningful to the user (actively searching for information), than the dumb banner ads meeting every visitor on the same site, without differentiating between those interested and those who aren’t.
We’ll take a closer look at Google’s ad services at a later stage, but it is worth noting just a few things about their model. It presumes, that “search” is the way people find information on the web. It presumes that the web consists of meaningful, differentiated entities called websites. It is difficult to see, if the model is capable of differentiating between different types of products, or if it treats all the same. The model is good for niche products, in the sense that it reaches the users, who actively search for information about them. The obvious drawback for the niche producer is that he or she will have to pay up front, before any product has been sold (pay per click/view), and that he or she will have to invest a lot of time in creating and administrating a website and a payment system, in order to ‘monetize’ the traffic the ads bring in.
Bittorrent
Bittorrent provides a brilliant, decentralized distribution method, but it comes without tools to make products seen or charged for, which makes it less of an ideal solution, unless matched with other methods to create visibility and earn money (from traffic, for instance).
Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer technology, which allocates resources on a p2p network very effectively, by utilizing locally excess bandwidth and harddrive space. But, just as no method exists to charge for access, no method exists to provide incentive to continually host and seed files, especially files, which are less commonly in demand. This means, that while bittorrent is an effective, decentralized method of distributing large files, most torrents, which are less than popular, become “dead”, once the initial interest has faded. This leaves later peers emptyhanded and with no obvious way to obtain the material. Additionally, the bittorrent index-sites inherit the notion of “search” as the key to finding information. This means, that niche torrents are even harder off, as no method exists within the bittorrent model to make torrents more or less visible or known by peers, to make them able to search for them. Of course, if one utilizes bittorrent as a distribution model, one could easily match bittorrent with Google’s ad offerings. But this, then, leaves a producer with only expenditure, no income method, apart from what Adsense or other sideshow-income streams may pay.
For p2p networks, step one may have been to come out in the open, to publicize these vast indexes of mostly copyrighted material openly on the web. Now, step two must be to start finding ways to make it easy to utilize p2p networks as proper distribution channels.
In each their ways, these two examples contribute pieces to an image facing an online niche distributor, of which the key challenges are visibility and financing. The first installment of Kaplak will seek to answer these two challenges before others. What do you think? What are the primary challenges meeting you, as a niche producer using the internet?
Before we begin exploring concepts and concrete examples, we may do well from presenting the boundaries, within which this blog will operate.
First, this blog is a blog of a start-up company, which has the overall purpose to make money, eventually. This is worth noting. We view everything through this lense of creating a surplus of value, first for our customers (for without these, we won’t make any ourselves) and second, for Kaplak. It is also, and most importantly, a blog exploring a specific set of problems concerning cultural distribution on the internet. Last, but not least, it is a channel to communicate our progress, to eventually link to our demos and prototypes for you to try them out, and to ask for help filling in our surveys.
We need to get in touch with people, who share our problem and vision, and who can help define, explore and shape it. We need to test assumptions, collect qualified data and ressources for us to build valuable, flexible, lasting solutions to the problems at hand. We also need to hook up with people, who has very specific expertises and talents, in order to succeed with Kaplak.
According to the description for Kaplak.com in our internal wiki, the blog is part of Kaplak’s strategy to generate traffic from very specific individuals, which could be our first early customers, actively looking on the web for solutions to their very specific problem. We do this best by writing a well-written, (somewhat) regularly updated blog with great articles, containing
[...] valuable information relevant for our target group, around the specific theme “the ecology and economy of niche products in the digital realm”, in the past, present and future. Secondly, the blog will seek to identify challenges (at the core) for niche producers, and thirdly, explore how Kaplak is going to meet these challenges. At a later stage, the blog will also seek to follow the development of Kaplak prototypes, and present them to the public as we go.
To examine the ecology and economy of niche products in the digital realm means :
In the past, present and future
Understand the premises we stand on, past and present examples to learn from, and future technologies and social patterns which promise new solutions to known problems.
To identify challenges
What are the problems met by niche producers? What are the challenges for their customers? What does the digital consumer-producer convergence entail for cultural production and distribution? How does one get “seen” on the internet? How does one get paid? And much more.
How is Kaplak going to meet the challenges?
Conceptually, architecturally and technically, how do we want to tackle the problems, we need to solve? What does our solutions look like? How do they work? How much do they cost? How can they be made available?
Kaplak’s first website is online! It is yet a very simple website. For now it basically consists of a mailing list and this blog, and a few pages with what may be quite insufficient information about Kaplak and what Kaplak is about. There are good reasons that information so far may be insufficient.
The primary one is that we want to develop Kaplak with you, and develop what Kaplak is about during the course of this blog. While we, being the initial founders of Kaplak, indeed have some ideas of our own about it, we want Kaplak the product and Kaplak the company to meet and seek to solve real problems, faced by our customers.
We don’t want to pre-determine everything by creating too complete descriptions, saying, for instance, that Kaplak is an advertising agency, an affiliate marketing service, a search engine, a web host, a web index, an open source software project, a p2p filesharing network, a wiki, a new YouTube or an online payment service. This will close the project much too narrowly on just one particular method, concept or branch of services. Kaplak is neither of these things, yet Kaplak will probably contain and converge many of the assets and characteristics, we have come to associate with online services and phenomena as these.
We do want, however, to focus on the problems, which you, as an established or emerging cultural producer, face on an internet, which grows by millions of new websites every month. What do you create, and how do you make a living? How are you seen? How do you make yourself and your product visible? How do you utilize the possibilities the connected world offers you today? What problems do you see? What tools do you need, to make your life easier, tomorrow?
This blog aims to explore what Kaplak is about, and what life is about on the slim end of the long tail. We welcome you onboard this virgin voyage of ours, and we hope to see you here again and hear what you think!
