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Implicit is the New Explicit
There are more opportunities to take advantage of content then to create it yourself
by Auren Hoffman, May 2, 2008
Taking advantage of existing user generated content (UGC) can be more far-reaching and impactful than trying to generate new UGC from scratch.
There are a lot of new startups that coin themselves as "Web 2.0" and are focused on creating user generated content. These companies try to get people to come to their site and create content in order to create a community, as well as to increase page views and uniques which invariably capitalizes on their advertising business model. There are impressive players in the explicit UGC space, including brands we all know like Facebook, Digg, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Flickr, YouTube, Slide, and RockYou. Some of these sites are really good at linking people (e.g. Facebook), helping you find UGC through search (e.g. YouTube), and search engine optimizations (e.g. Digg, Yelp).
All these sites written up on TechCrunch have essentially the same mission - obtain a ton of users to come to the site to create original content that cannot be found elsewhere. Think of a Web 2.0 company and there is a high likelihood it fits the description above.
But (and this is a HUGE 'but') these companies are not taking enough advantage of the content that already exists on other sites. Given the trend towards openness of data, this content obtained from other sites is implicit information that can be easily indexed (across thousands of these sites) and then be compiled.
Moreover, there is a growing amount of content being created on niche sites like forums, blogs (and blog comments), and discussion boards. While few of these niche sites will become big businesses, in aggregate they contain a lot of valuable content that can be mined and processed.
Zillow, Trulia, and real-estate aggregators focus and rely on implicit information and data. Travel search (e.g. SideStep) is also implicit-based. And the most dominant player on the Internet, Google, is implicit - search engines don't create their own content but instead rely on the content of others.
In order for traditional companies that focus on explicit UGC to be effective, they often need to build a walled garden. Because the content is proprietary to their site, they lose out if users are leaving their site. They don't want to make things open. Some explicit new wave companies (e.g. Twitter, Flickr) have bucked that trend by being open, but most are closed in Web 0.6 Prodigy-style.
Let's take a look at one of my favorite sites: Yelp. Yelp is awesome and has done a great job encouraging people to write explicit reviews on their site. If I was going to build a competitor to Yelp, I would not compete with them on gathering explicit reviews but would instead gather implicit information on local restaurants. You can gather this information from other review sites like the San Francisco Chronicle, government agencies that rate the cleanliness, legal databases that document lawsuits, and more. And restaurants and other brick and mortars have great identifiers - phone number and address - that are usually unique and therefore easy to find and collect information.
The other problem for companies collecting explicit UGC is that they encounter a huge marketing problem and therefore must have a gargantuan budget. This is why all these explicit companies are raising large capital rounds (often over $25 million) right now. They also require a real skill at viral tuning, street marketing, or search engine optimization (and often all three). If you are really good at marketing, then you should create a company dedicated to getting users and having them generate content.
Implicit companies, by contrast, encounter a huge technology problem and their budget is focused on building out that technology. If you are a technologist then you should be opting to take advantage of content on other sites. That is, of course, what makes Google so successful.
If you're neither the marketing guru nor the technologist, you might want to sit this new technology wave out and watch from the sidelines as implicit companies will benefit from and give benefit to its explicit counterparts.
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Men are from Video Games, Women are from Social Networks
The Gender Gap on Social Media is Growing
by Auren Hoffman, April 7, 2008
It should come as no shock that men and women act very different online. The web is an extremely social medium, with Web 2.0 being all about social. Men traditionally are early adopters, especially when it comes to tech, but when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront.
At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they are using social media. While the trends among the sexes indicate they are both massively using social media, women are far outpacing men - here is our hypothesis as to why:
Just the facts, madam
For those under 30, women and men are just as likely to be members of social networks. Sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Flixster are extraordinarily popular. But we found that young women are much more active on these sites then young men. And for people above 30, men - especially married men - aren't even joining social networks.. With the notable exception of LinkedIn usage and VCs in the Bay Area friending everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between the ages 35-50 are the fastest growing segment on social networks, especially on MySpace.
Looking further into this trend, we believe that young men spend as much time (and sometimes more) in front of a computer than young women. And they have just as much free time, if not more. But we believe the competition for their computer time comes from spending hours playing video games such as World of Warcraft and many first-person action games.
Many men who play casual games tend to like games like poker with betting involved. Since most social networks ban gambling, men find sites (most of them offshore) that allow them to wager when they play. Women on the other hand are large consumers of casual games and most social networks, especially those that are dominated by third party applications, are essentially big casual game networks. Young women also spend much more time decorating their social network profile pages, making slide shows, and more. Popular sites such as Whateverlife.com exacerbate this effect by offering and catering MySpace layouts to young women.
So while young men and women are signing up for social networks at a similar rate, young women are "throwing more sheep" at people.
Now young men understand that they can't spend ALL their time playing video games (though some do) as they still need to interact with the opposite sex. Sex is one of the strongest drivers of online usage and many men see social networks as a gateway to potentially filling that desire. Men, in general, tend to look at things more transactionally than women. Once men get married, they see increasingly less value in being on a social network. Which, of course, is why married men dominate LinkedIn - the most transactional social network (with the exception of AdultFriendFinder). LinkedIn is all about getting information and introductions now.
Women, on the other, hand are much more relationship driven and less transactional than men. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, making new friends, and more. Married women put up pictures of their immediate family on social networks and use their social network profile as a family home page to share with friends and relatives.
With all this happening, we're witnessing a burgeoning gender gap.
Just take a look at RockYou and Slide, two dominant photo widget sites, These sites are very clearly targeting young women, down to the fact that they have traditional feminine colors (i.e. purple and pink), glitter text everywhere, and are almost exclusively decorated with pictures of women. They don't even give men lip service on their site. Both companies do have a few niche Facebook applications that target men, but the fact these applications are hidden and often marketed under different brands proves that that women rule this space.
If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men's adoption to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.
There may actually be some truth in the old adage that "men are from Mars" and "women are from Venus", even in the online domain.
More: Data from the Rapleaf study |
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Consumer Control in a Data-Driven World
by Auren Hoffman, February 5, 2008
The amount of data collected on you increases every year. And recently, the slope of the curve is getting steeper as there is much more data to collect, including your demographics, digital footprint, purchase history, where you are driving, how you are traveling, your network of friends, and even some of the most intimate details of your personal life.
At the same time, we’re not living in a Brave New World or 1984-type society where there is only one collector of this data, akin to the all-knowing Stasi in East Germany. It is actually much scarier than that. The number of actors collecting this data is growing astronomically. Today there are tens of thousands of actors collecting information about you and these include corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and others.
Of course there are a lot of apparent and unapparent benefits to having all this data collected. We can obtain readily accessible credit – the underpinning of why the U.S. economy is so strong – due to the fact that our debt payment data is easily accessible. Micro-targeting to your likes and interest is much better than receiving irrelevant spam. And very few web sites would work well without cookies grabbing your site preferences or shopping cart info.
Up to now, consumers have been willing to tolerate less privacy for the benefits of a frictionless world. But they are getting increasingly uneasy about this trade, especially since the trade is becoming a far worse deal for consumers. Data collectors are not giving enough back to consumers and that needs to change.
We believe that consumers will demand and receive – either by consumer action or government regulation – the following three rights:
#1 – You should know more about yourself than anyone else knows about you.
Consumers should have the right to find out what data is being collected about them. As a consumer, you should be able to go to DoubleClick, AdBrite, Advertising.com, Google, Yahoo, Aggregate Knowledge, etc. and a list of all the websites that track you. You should be able to go to Choicepoint, Experian, Acxiom, Rapleaf, etc. and see all the data they collect on you. You should be able to see the same government records that the DMV, FBI and Medicare have on you. And you should be able to access this data for free at anytime.
#2 – You should be able to opt-opt.
You should have the right to opt-out, either wholly or partially, of being tracked. That means you should have the right to tell DoubleClick to never track you, or just not on sports sites in particular.
#3 – Your data should be owned by you and be portable anywhere.
You should be able to move or copy your data from one location to another location. Essentially, you should be able to export your data from Doubleclick and import it to a different system. When you join a new social network, you should be able to take your social graph from Facebook or LinkedIn with you and tear down these walled gardens.
While consumer advocates have been talking about these three rights for years, we’re closing in on making these rights a reality. With respect to item #1, consumers can now check their credit history for free once a year from each credit agency. For item #2, next generation data collectors (like Rapleaf) allow consumers to easily and selectively opt-out. And on item #3, most blog-readers have agreed to a common OPML standard for easily exporting and importing the blogs you read.
But more pressure needs to be exerted on the extreme violators of these three consumer rights and the forward-thinking data-collectors must differentiate themselves with consumers. |
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