Entrepreneur On Yahoo/Tumblr: It's the Content Readers, Stupid 92
An anonymous reader writes "Weighing in on Yahoo's recent acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, social networking entrepreneur Adam Rifkin argues that Tumblr is extremely valuable business property because it has successfully organized itself around the 'Interest Graph' (people interested in the same hobbies or things), rather than the 'Social Graph' (family, friends, and coworkers/colleagues, as is typical for Facebook). He opines that, for a social networking site, readers are far more important than writers; writers, after all, 'have time but no money. Certain groups are going to be overrepresented: Students, stay-at-home moms, the underemployed, retirees.' While readers are just the opposite: they 'have money but no time.... They want to see a picture of a watch they like, and buy it now.' In other words, it's the readers of the content that businesses are trying to reach. And interest graphs can be specifically targeted by businesses, much more so than social graphs."
Re:people actually read tumblr? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't watch the Superbowl, but no matter how much time I spend say playing or watching Ice hockey it will in no way will diminish the value of targeting all those follow the NFL.
It's called multipliers (Score:2, Insightful)
People who can get other people to listen to them (or to read, whatever) are called multipliers, because if you can convince or persuade one of them, they convince or persuade many for you. That's why "content is king". You don't get to the masses without the few people that the masses look up to. Of course you want to have the writers who write what is worthwhile to read. Pretty much by definition that can't be any service with millions of users.
so am i a reader or a writer? (Score:5, Insightful)
im trying to figure out which color of star i should have to sew onto my sleeve when they come around asking for my papers.
aha, the 'consumption economy' nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
readers are far more important than writers
- the "consumption economy" nonsense strikes again.
In this case production is writing and reading is consumption. If the readers are not exchanging anything of their own for the content they consume, then the writers (producers) aren't getting anything from that trade.
Rifkin is wrong about more than that, both, the readers and the writers are products on these sites, their information is collected and exchanged, the customers are the businesses that pay for the information.
Has ANY reader on tumbler actually paid for anything TO tumbler? I doubt it. Just like no writer on FB paid for anything there.
What Rifkin is confused is the reason as to why it is even possible to find investors into such business models in the first place, the reasons are not obvious at the first glance, because you have to step back and take a look at the bigger economy around. The bigger economy is massively lacking savings and investments and the business climate is destroyed. This is NOT an economy of readers, this is not even an economy of writers, this is an economy entirely based on fake money.
The banks, the hedge funds are able to borrow fake money created by the Federal reserve at fake interest rates and they have no incentive to use that money for any productive business that will NOT generate 50 or 100 times the original investment back. So every attempt at a new social site is just a gamble.
This market in social media development is just like the larger bond and stock markets (and other fake loan markets, like the student loan market). This is all about cheap money and lack of real business opportunities, complete lack of real savers of-course, so the only people that are still making money are those, who have access to cheap money provided by the Fed basically (through whatever intermediaries).
This is a fake economy, those readers and writers BOTH have no money but what the fake economy is able to borrow or just steal from the dollar asset holders around the world via inflation (money printing).
This is a fake money, gambler based economy and it is the most unstable type of economy you can imagine and it has 0 chances of growing an actual productive economy until this fake economy implodes.
Re:Maybe its about class (Score:5, Insightful)