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Wharton Professor of Operations and Information Management Kartik Hosanagar speaks at Supernova 2008 on “Recommender Systems: The Present and Future of Personalization Recommendations.”
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For all the success of the current wave of online services, a handful of advertising models produce virtually all the revenue. How do things evolve as software merges with Web-based services, and the Net becomes more open, more participatory, and more complex? Will the largest portals and social networks absorb most of the value, or will more-focused players be able to thrive? Will advertising remain the dominant monetization strategy, and if so, how big can the pie grow?
Stephan Zimmermann (McKinsey) leads a discussion featuring Doug Mack (Adobe), Craig Sherman (Gaia Online), and David Kidder (Clickable) about what it takes to monetize successfully in the current environment, and what may change in the future.
Wharton Professor Eric Clemons, a noted expert on the strategic implications of information technology spoke at Supernova 2008 about monetization models for the next generation of Internet businesses. Due to a medical issue, Eric was unable to fly out to the conference, so he recorded his remarks, and engaged in a live Q&A session via videoconference. His PowerPoint presentation (PDF) is also available.
Eric Clemons: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1279) Eric Clemons Q&A: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1329)
Nick Douglas discusses the VC and Entrepreneurship panel with Jim Lussier.
Link: sevenload.com
An article in today’s New York Times ends by saying that 85% of California adults think sites should not track around-the-web behavior for the purpose of ad targeting. The rest of the article describes how many of the major commercial web companies do just that.
There’s a comScore graphic that shows how many times a month companies collect user data: Yahoo collects twice as often as Fox, which collects twice as often as AOL. Google (not including DoubleClick) comes up 4th.
This data, however, doesn’t include information entered on MySpace’s social network pages, and the article doesn’t cover Facebook. Even if web companies aren’t putting two and two together yet, they will be soon.
If we’re not already, we’ll be seeing ads that come to us thanks to a delectable combination of which causes we join on Facebook, which people we befriend on MySpace, which keywords we use on search sites, and what products we buy online… combined of course with our offline data: which magazines we subscribe to, what we buy at the grocery store, and what we put on our credit cards. Is this OK?
Many a social network user’s holy grail is to see social networks aggregated - to quote Jeremiah Owyang,
A movement has been started to allow these relationships to be transplanted from one social network to another. The goal? reduce inefficient adding of relationships, improving the accuracy of the network, and providing users with control and management of their relationship data.
I spent some time several years ago working at Sxip pursuing one aspect of this dream. Kaliya Hamlin of Open ID, the folks who started FOAF, and many others (feel free to help me out by listing in comments) have continued the crusade.
Here’s my question: Is the fight to look at this problem from the user’s perspective a losing battle? When it happens, perhaps it will be the provider’s profit motive that drives it, and the advertisers that benefit. Jeremiah suggests that the benefit to the social network is “increase their number of users”. But isn’t the real benefit “finally make real money by selling user data to the highest bidder to make more targeted ads”?
Can users really retain control of their data, or has the horse already left the barn? Maybe we want to keep our social networks separate after all.
Interested to hear your thoughts.
Silicon Valley social media entrepreneur Elliot Ng posted at length on Friday about the San Francisco Supernova mixer. He includes some nice crowd shots and more good breakdown of Owyang’s conversation about the Social Graph. Here are some of the insights he picked up on:
- Social Networks will be like air (Charlene Li) - ubiquitous and not locking people in to any distinct provider
- Therefore it may be hard to monetize them (Joi Ito) - the way AOL had to relinquish email “ownership” as it became a ubiquitous service
- Mobile devices will play a large role in the spread of social technology
- Characteristics of social networks in the future (check Ng’s post for his take on this part of the discussion; it’s interesting.)
Other posts about the mixer event from Susan Mernit, insights from Ted Shelton, a cross-post on Brian Solis’ bub.blicio.us, a bit of humor from David Spark, and last but not least, for the heck of it I’ll include Chris Carfi’s tweet.
Here’s the full suite of photos Brian Solis took that night as well.
I just wanted to point out several great posts that are out there after last Thursday’s Supernova mixer at Wharton West in San Francisco.
Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist, was a featured discussion leader and posted at length about the evening, including photos. Jeremiah led the audience in a discussion about the Social Graph.
He lists some points that were made by the audience during the discussion, including:
- how to attract and keep participants (good user experience, limit spam, encourage the niche, improve the infrastructure with standards and APIs);
- how social networks can monetize (ads, downloading, subscription, ecommerce, market research);
- and the future of social networks (a few big players and lots of niches, teens drive adoption, mobile, aggregation).
It strikes me that many of these points about social networks are really the same points we could make (and probably have) about websites generally. Plus ca change…
Renee Blodgett posted her thoughts about the other discussion session, led by Internet guru Jerry Michalski, on new business and ad models. Some of the points she picked up on include:
- it’s all about virality or “what catches on”
- catchy jingles that grab the public’s attention rely on everyone watching the same three TV channels and are going the way of the dinosaur
- buying behavior is changing
- future lies in innovation, experimentation, listening, relationships, delivering on your promises
- strongest consumer is women over 30 but funded ideas are coming from men under 25 (Mary Hodder)
Renee then posted some portrait photos she took at the event. My personal favorite is one she didn’t take (because she’s in it). There’s cool-as-a-cucumber Renee looking for all the world like one of the Ramones and Rohit Khare with a skeptical little grin on his face. What was the photographer saying to get this reaction from these two?
I’ll cover some more mixer posts in my next update.
Twitter feed -- follow it for news and notes.
Supernova 2008 Facebook group.
IRC channel -- live web chat. To get around issue of IRC being blocked at UCSF- use http://is.gd/yKa - MIbbit.com
IT Conversations -- audio podcasts.
2007 Video Interviews by our blogging team.
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