About Ben Elowitz
About Ben Elowitz Ben Elowitz is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a next-generation media platform company that is reinventing the media model on the social web. The company platforms attract more than 16 million unique visitors monthly. In addition to Digital Quarters, he writes Media Success, a bold and forthright newsletter for digital media thought leaders. His work has been featured in FORTUNE, TechCrunch, All Things D, The Huffington Post, Forbes, TIME, CNNMoney, paidContent, and CNBC.com, among others. Prior to Wetpaint, Ben co-founded Blue Nile (NILE), the largest online retailer of luxury goods. Ben was also an early employee at Fatbrain.com (FATB), an ecommerce company that went public in 1998 and was sold to Barnes & Noble in 1999. Ben holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an angel investor in a number of media and ecommerce companies, and is a frequent conference speaker on digital media, social content, and entrepreneurship.
Posts Tagged ‘Google’
How Facebook Is Crushing Search
2 Feb2012
by Jeff Berman
This piece from Jeff Berman is the second in a series of 10 posts about the future of the media industry contained in a report titled: Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web.
Q: How does the rise of Facebook change the relationship between media and its audience?
Radically. The conversation has historically been pretty much one way – media to audience or audience to audience. And it hasn’t been at scale. In the new world, however, the conversation is scaled and omni-directional. Since Gutenberg, or at least since Marconi, media has had a massive megaphone. But the audience hasn’t had real power. Thomas Paine and his patriotic pamphlets may be the exception; Paine had a voice and a platform, but it wasn’t a scalable model and it lacked speed. Today, everyone is a publisher, and there can be millions of Thomas Paines, reaching tens of millions of people instantaneously. Everyone who wants to create compelling content, or a movement, now has the tools. This is a very different world from even seven years ago.
Q: What’s changed fundamentally about media with the rise of the social Web, and what do publishers need to do to adapt?
First, if you’re involved in a one-way discussion, you’re not taking advantage of the social Web opportunity, and you’re leaving a ton on the table. Another advantage if you’re a legacy media property – let’s say The Wire or The Godfather – is that you now have a chance to stay in the conversation and continue it, so you’re alive and you remain active in the culture. You can keep the property and the franchise in front of new and existing audiences, thanks to the new digital tools. If the show is taken off the air, for instance, it can still be all over Facebook. Audiences are empowered today, and folks want to participate in the conversation. No one may be able to control the conversation, but people do want to shape it – and they can. The social Web gives them choices, and it provides options and alternatives for publishers and media players, too.
Q: We’ve gone from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to SMO (Social Media Optimization), so how will search change as the Web becomes more social?
Here are some powerful numbers from a recent Forrester report. In 2004, 83 percent of Internet users deployed search engines to find content. That was before the rise of Facebook. By 2010, it was 61 percent. So, we saw a drop of a quarter in a six-year time frame, the same time frame in which social media took off. This isn’t a coincidence; it is, however, a causal relationship – and it makes sense, given what we know.
On a more sweeping level, we’ve historically learned about shows to watch and diapers to buy because we’ve spoken to friends and family. Now we’re taking these word-of-mouth conversations to the digital networks. And we’re not just using Google to search for the answers; we’re going to our friends’ Facebook pages (and, increasingly, to Twitter, particularly for real-time multi-platform engagement). This is trusted referral at scale, and it’s fast and reliable. That’s why Facebook represents such a monumental shift.
But let’s not forget that Facebook is just seven years old; You Tube is six years old; Groupon is three years old; the iPad is 18 months old – so anyone who proclaims a clear vision of the digital world even five years into the future is either a prophet or a fool. Broadly speaking, you will see evolution in SMO, and a continued deep integration of social functionality. The key point here is that Facebook is a part of today’s Internet operating system, so the efficiency and reliability of social sharing and peer reviews is going to increase big-time. In other words, the 83 percent, which fell to 61 percent, will fall even further as the social Web grows.
Finally, I’m especially interested in what Apple does with TV, and what will happen when Web TV is connected at scale and social functionality is built into the experience. The ability to share in real-time straight from whatever screen you happen to be viewing will meaningfully change the way we choose what content we engage with and how we engage with it.
Q: How do you build a brand in publishing when, with greater frequency, media is distributed through social channels?
There’s an apparent conflict out there right now. The brand world has never been more crowded than it is today. And yet it’s never been easier to build a massive new brand. The reason? As the universe gets more crowded, brand-building tools are being disintermediated. Spotify is a good example. All of a sudden, it’s skyrocketing, in no small part, because its offering is social. The same is true for LivingSocial and Groupon. These businesses have exploded like we’ve never seen before largely because of social functionality. People find it easy to share their experiences about the products, and they like having others show them the way to the marketplace. This is authentic social content.
Q: What are the critical success factors in publishing as we look to 2020; and who will be the winners?
The old axiom that you have to fish where the fish are holds true so it starts with platform ubiquity. We’ve seen this already with the explosive growth of mobile, and it’s just going to intensify as a necessary success factor over the next decade. For the vast majority of publishers, you will have to empower your audience to experience your content where, when, and how they want.
For startups, this is in their DNA. But the recent history of media suggests such change is not easy for mature publishers. You simply may have to cannibalize profitable (but declining or soon-to-be-declining) businesses to build for the future. That, or risk watching a newcomer come along and eat your lunch.
Jeff Berman is the General Manager of Digital Media for the NFL. He previously held a series of positions at MySpace, ultimately serving as President of Sales & Marketing. Prior to entering the digital media space, Berman was Chief Counsel to United States Senator Charles E. Schumer and a public defender representing children charged in the District of Columbia’s adult criminal courts. He also held an adjunct professorship at the Georgetown University Law Center.
To download the complete report, please click here: “Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web”
by Ben Elowitz
In yesterday’s Media Industry Social Leaderboard, I noted that leading web publishers on the web saw a staggering 17% increase in their social traffic from November to December. These top 50 websites are now averaging about 8 million referrals per month from Facebook.
At this rate, the question asked by Fred Wilson and others is: how long until social drives more traffic than search? Based on data from Compete.com, it won’t be long at all. Let’s look at the specifics.
Facebook Drives Almost As Much Traffic As Google
When it comes to driving traffic, the gap between social and search is already smaller than most realize. In fact, for every 100 visits that Google sent to the top 50 web publishers in November, Facebook sent 62. By December, it was already up to 73 visits from Facebook for every 100 from Google.
At the same time, search traffic to these publishers is stable to declining, with Google referrals falling 0.5% over the same period.
So how long until Facebook outranks Google? If these monthly rates of change were to continue apace, Facebook traffic would outrank Google traffic for the top 50 publishers in aggregate by March of this year!
Seven Publishers Already Get More Traffic From Social Than Search
Shockingly, Compete.com data shows that already seven of the top 50 publishers get more traffic from Facebook than from Google: MSN, ThePostGame, Yahoo, Aol, People, Fox Sports, and US Magazine. These seven publishers received in aggregate 12% more visits from Facebook than they did from Google last month.
And that set of publishers has already grown by five from just a month earlier, in November of 2011, when only MSN and ThePostGame showed more traffic from social than from search.
But seven is just a snapshot in time. Based on recent trends, by the middle of this year, I’d expect it to grow to a dozen publishers or more.
Facebook is Over-Taking Google as a Traffic Source to Top 50 Web Publishers
by Ben Elowitz
This article was published as a guest post at XConomy, and is republished here for Digital Quarters readers.
I’ve been taking in Google’s recent release of “Search, plus your world” (or SPYW as the cool kids say) over the last several days, reflecting on what it means for Wetpaint and other media companies; but perhaps even more importantly, deeply understanding what it indicates about Facebook and Google themselves. As we all know by now, these most recent changes are meant to make its search more personal by up-weighting social activity in its algorithm, and using each person’s own position within their circles to determine relevance.
You might think that I would be one of the first to jump in the game with Google. After all, my company Wetpaint has been making a massive investment in distributing our content via other social channels, particularly Facebook. We’ve been seeing massive returns. And, I’ve even gone on a limb to predict that Facebook should be implementing its own Web-wide search this year.
Still, when it comes to playing Google’s social games, so far I’ve advocated staying on the sidelines of all their social venues—even their recent business pages. That’s been because even though the stadium lights are on, no one is on the field. More specifically, even though Google has 90 million registered users of the service, we see very little activity of significance among our target audience. But with its new SPYW changes, the question is: Has Google indeed forced companies’ hands?
Unfortunately, they have. And, in doing so, it marks a milestone in the changing mentality of Google. The search company’s great innovation—using the signals of the Web to best determine what the audience really wanted—has now been subverted. The company’s originally unshakable-seeming ethos of mechanistic neutrality has slowly, slowly, slowly, and now all of a sudden given way, and the new precedent is to favor its own business interests over those of the audience.
The result, like it or not, is that companies that rely on search for traffic must hear and obey loud and clear Google’s message that Google will favor those that favor it. It’s a dirty truth, and one far more chilling than the other more technical biases of its algorithm before.
Google has already started infusing search with the content that’s been blessed via Google+. Do a search for “New York Times” and you’ll probably find the New York Times plus.google.com page as the second search result. Search for “Mark Zuc” and you’ll likely see Zuckerberg’s Google+ page (despite the irony) populate as an option in the Google Instant choices.
I haven’t seen this bleed over to news stories yet, but I believe that it’s coming. Soon you’ll do a search for the latest headlines and your search results will be chock full with musings from your friends and non-friends inside Google+.
Google+ may not take off as a real social network, but Google has indicated that it’s throwing its full weight behind it anyway to make the best of what it’s got. Even if consumers don’t adopt it en masse, whatever activity is present will pepper the famous algorithm’s search results.
The irony here is that Google’s pivot toward a social search belies how important that social data is. The company is putting its lock on search at risk to gain a chance at a foothold on social. But what really comes through to me is that a great social search can be a winning product—if it’s populated with the right social data. So far, Google’s is not.
The question is—if that’s what I’m after—won’t I still just go to Facebook, where all my friends actually are (and which Google has adamantly cut out of SPYW)?
While SPYW does force publishers to support Google’s social network, fortunately it will be a temporary sacrifice from publishers during this period of transition from these days of search to a socially wired world. And that forthcoming world looks increasingly like it will be wired not by Google, but by its arch-enemy Facebook. Indeed, by corrupting the quality of their search product, Google may have just opened up a clear product entry into search for their rival as well.
- In: Facebook|Google|Search
- Tags: Digital Media, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, new media, Search, seo, social media optimization, social search, Wetpaint
The Coming Video War Between Apple and Google
21 Dec2011
by Ben Elowitz
This follows my recent post about how a new TV interface from Apple could decimate the television landscape.
Even though Steve Jobs never talked about changing the face of search with Siri, its natural language interface.
But doing so would certainly be a riveting Hollywood screenplay in which Jobs, the uber-innovative, uber-inventive CEO, ultimately gets revenge on a corporate rival he views as a “copy cat.”
In this fictional script, that rival would be Eric Schmidt, one of the top executives at search giant Google. It’s Google, after all, that’s breathing down Apple’s neck with its rapidly expanding Android phone platform – a platform that, according to Jobs and his lawyers, mimics Apple’s breakthrough iPhone technology.
Putting this Oscar dream aside, there’s intensifying competition heating up between Apple and Google, even though Jobs is –sadly – no longer on the scene.
Indeed, even though Google has had voice-enabled search for some time on iOS and Android devices, Schmidt has said it’s possible that Siri could be a real and radical game-changer.
Schmidt may be right. And if he is, then Google will be facing a serious threat as Apple reinvents Google’s home turf of search.
With a “personality” that displays a unique understanding of humanity, Siri’s digital chromosomes enrich the user’s experience. This sets it apart from Google’s more mechanical offerings, and shows why Apple’s consumer-obsessed culture is so different from Google’s corporate DNA, which is as robotic and algorithmic as the “Android” name suggests.
There is rich irony here, as Apple disintermediates the greatest disintermediator of all time. When Google’s superior search service started, it practically single-handedly reduced the brand-driven experience that consumers had thereto relied on with directories and a fully editorialized Web. Google replaced those channels and home pages with 10 blue links. And in the process, became users’ destination of first resort 13 times per day.
And Apple has always been a curator extraordinaire – developing collections and exercising famous (and occasionally notorious) judgment to determine who deserves to be in its directories of songs and apps.
But now, Siri stands ready to flatten the world of entertainment.
In all fairness, Page and his team are now trying hard to enrich the user experience by aligning their YouTube brand with media companies like Disney, and doling out big dollars for proprietary programming. The hope here is that YouTube can create dozens of lucrative user-friendly / user-favorite Web channels featuring comedians, sports stars, musicians and other entertainers. The company is building stocks of its ‘own’ media weapons in preparation for the coming war.
But, as always, it will be hard for Google to win the hearts of consumers when it comes to content; and it will be especially daunting because Apple is already so completely connected to users.
Meanwhile, with its enviable consumer connection, Apple will undoubtedly extract a toll from media companies, who still want to bathe in the warm digital light that emanates from the inviting and engaging brand Jobs built. And, as it has in every other media category, Apple stands to capture an outsize share of profits for delivering content into a magical consumer experience.
Jealous much, Google?
Can Social Drive As Much Traffic As Search?
13 Dec2011
by Ben Elowitz
I’ve projected before that within the next couple of years, social can drive as much traffic as search to major media properties – especially those that are driven by real-time news. But I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon!
Yesterday was a milestone here at Wetpaint: social for the day drove over 45% of our audience visits; while search brought in about 30%.
Now consider this: Layer on the ~150% higher lifetime value of our social audience (our social users stay longer, come back more frequently, and bring additional viral referrals), and social was responsible for over 60% of the value of our audience yesterday.
It may start as an outlier, but it’s going to get more common. We are on track to be the #1 social publisher within a short time. Want to know where you stand too? Stay tuned for the updated media industry social leaderboard, which I’ll be posting in the next few days.
- In: Facebook|Online News|Publishing platforms|Search|Social Networks
- Tags: Facebook, Google, news, Search, seo, smo, Social Networks, twitter, Wetpaint
6 Lessons For the Key Players In New Media
2 Nov2011
by Ben Elowitz
This post was originally as a contributed piece to Fortune. It is republished here for Digital Quarters readers.
Tech’s top firms — from Apple and Google to Amazon and Netflix — are vying to reshape media with different game plans. Here’s what they each need to know.
Digital media has the power to change the world. Actually mastering this 21st century business (and art) is unbelievably hard, however. That begs the question: The top media companies all know they need to make changes — but how do they find the right change and execute well? Let’s look at this question through the lens of six key players in the digital media revolution.
Apple (AAPL): Transform the rest of our digital experience.
It may seem arrogant to give advice to the one company that has surprised everyone again and again by being light years ahead of the industry — as well as the consumer. Yet, in a new era of leadership, the most important thing for Apple will be holding on to Jobs’ core values and strength. As corporate leaders go, Jobs was always the best change agent on the planet, and he was never willing to accept the status quo. That’s why Apple is a perennial leader when it comes to devices and distribution for premium media content like music and movies.
The Apple crew must extend its golden touch to the rest of the digital media device world. It’s time to supply the living room with a first-class TV experience; and to seamlessly flow all entertainment between the mobile, iPad, TV, and desktop worlds. AirPlay, iCloud, and AppleTV aren’t all the way there yet. Apple’s next challenge is to make devices that leap forward and bring entertainment and applications wherever I am, and to know me as one person across all of these environments. To do so — and to do so well — will take a huge imagination. And, even without Jobs himself, it’s clear that if anyone can do it, it’s still Apple.
Facebook: Be everywhere the consumer is.
More than any other company on the Web — even Apple — Facebook has changed the nature of digital experiences. It’s already established itself as the dominant social operating system for consumer audiences. And yet it has the potential to go much, much farther. If you need more proof, just this month Facebook announced that it will be facilitating the spread of mobile applications, not to mention linking into them — finally bridging the gap between Web and app. It’s invading Apple iOS’ and Google Android’s territory, providing the cross-application linkages that have always unequivocally been the job of an operating system.
Increasingly, Facebook has the opportunity to wire consumers, applications, data and devices together. But for Facebook to do this, Mark Zuckerberg will need the kind of imagination that Steve Jobs had. Indeed, Zuckerberg will have to imagine a whole new ecosystem, this time one where Facebook facilitates all connectivity. He’s proven he can execute already. But can he take on a vision this big?
Google (GOOG): “What got you here won’t get you there.”
This trademark phrase from Wetpaint COO Rob Grady is particularly apt in Google’s case. Google is the undisputed king of finding answers to questions — as long as they’re being asked from desktop and laptop computers. But when it comes to applying its great search strength to mobile environments, tablet devices and communications, Google is still lost. While the Android operating system is clearly one of the winners, it doesn’t give Google the essential financial success in mobile that it has on the desktop. Google needs to reinvent itself. It needs to make a bold “burn-the-bridges” move, adopting a Reed Hastings-like philosophy that the company cannot rely on search alone. Only, in Google’s case, it’s even harder.
Here’s why: Hastings had already clearly identified the next wave’s product at Netflix (NFLX) — streaming video over the Internet — but Google has to find a new vision altogether. This is not to say that Google needs to exit the search market by any means. But, instead, it must reinvent its own search portfolio, the way Intel (INTC) reinvented the microprocessor generation after generation, always allowing its newest chip to put the last one out of business, before the competition did. Indeed, Intel’s sustained success was built, in part, on destroying what worked and replacing it with something that worked even better. Google’s new vision should surely have three components: mobile, search and social. The good news is that, thanks to Android, Google already has A+ platforms to build on the first two.
But search needs to get beyond the query box, and the mobile device can be more than a phone plus PDA. Google’s challenge — and its opportunity — is to reinvent it as a completely connected device that is woven into the fabric of daily living. It should know where I am, who I’m with, and what I’m doing — or at least have some educated guesses. It should make the next interface leap that helps us leave the thumbs behind. And, it should be a digital companion that picks up on environmental cues and helps me live my digital life. Siri has opened our imagination; but Google has amazing voice recognition, algorithmic and platform strength to accomplish these things. Now it sorely needs to understand people. That’s the most pressing — and most problematic — task for Larry Page and his team in 2012.
Amazon (AMZN): Fully bridge digital media and commerce.
If Facebook is the ultimate platform for social connectivity, it’s pretty clear that Amazon should be the ultimate platform for media and commerce. Amazon has already made amazing progress in redefining itself. It started as a bookseller, became a retailer, began representing other retailers and, most importantly, has morphed into a media and device company. And, as if that’s not enough, its Web Services power tons of other companies that make the Internet fascinating.
That said, a scattershot approach won’t help Amazon become the single defining platform that bridges digital media and commerce. Amazon has tremendous assets in its catalogue, in terms of both physical and digital goods. And it also has devices that give it a unique channel to the consumer — for the time being, at least. But to fulfill its true potential, Amazon needs to extend its platform all the way to commercial transactions, wherever they happen.
Beyond digital goods, Amazon should be working on digital currency and customer management; an acquisition of Square would be a tremendous accelerator here, and it would ultimately help Jeff Bezos and his team power transactions wherever in the world they take place. What Facebook is to our social transactions, Amazon should be to our commercial ones — an OS for commerce. Indeed, Amazon has the opportunity to provide OpenTable-like services, for all commerce, not just for the restaurant industry. It’s already got the goods and the customer relationships. <ow it just needs the focus on the bigger opportunity.
Yahoo (YHOO): Decide what the brand really stands for.
On one hand, Yahoo is the most impressive all-digital media company there is. It has tremendous access to a huge audience of consumers, a broad product portfolio, an unrivaled heritage as a first-generation superstar and a unique reach into Asia. And yet, it’s also the most disappointing digital media company in the marketplace, so much so that its brand increasingly stands for nothing in particular to most of its audience.
Of late, attention has been focused on Yahoo from a financial point of view. But whoever eventually buys the company must look beyond integration, splitting and cost cutting. Instead, the acquirer will have to figure out what to do with Yahoo’s core. And it all comes down to one key question: What can Yahoo provide to its audience to earn their attention every day?
To date, the hook has been email. Yahoo Mail is responsible for about 75% of Yahoo’s media traffic. But Yahoo Mail isn’t growing. In the last year, it shrank slightly (<1 %), according to data from comScore. So, for Yahoo, the choices are to innovate in communication to leapfrog Gmail, Skype, and the lot; or else to do the hard work and start figuring out again what Yahoo really stands for. The company has great roots. It has a natural brand for serendipitous discovery, for fun and interesting news to make your day. The bottom line is that Yahoo should be able to execute on both the options listed above, hopefully without waiting for the financial dust to settle.
Washington Post (WPO): Re-inventing media’s most ravaged category.
If we had to name the most ravaged sector of media, it would certainly have to be newspapers. Don Graham recently said the industry is “collapsing.” But, he’s not just watching it happen; he’s actively and energetically intervening. I’ve been incredibly impressed by the way Graham and his team are up for re-inventing the category, especially as I’ve talked to other organizations that are nearly paralyzed. Instead, WaPo is applying the greatest growth trend of the Internet — social media — to its business. With its inordinately valuable and trusted brand at stake in the Washington Post, the risks are clearly high. Rather than acting out of fear, Don and his Chief Digital Officer, Vijay Ravindran, are taking aggressive advantage of opportunities to engage, grow and retain their core audience. At the same time, they’re downshifting to the younger audience that just isn’t buying newspapers. The Washington Post Social Reader is the flagship example, and it’s a bold move to jump ahead of the consumer and create a new experience for people that they didn’t know they needed, all on the social Web. [Full disclosure: My company Wetpaint works with the Post.]
We will see other awesome and amazing talents emerge in digital media over the next decade. These greats-in-the-making will help build on the staggering changes that technological change has wrought.
- In: Apps|Facebook|Google|Newspapers|Search
- Tags: Amazon, Apple, don graham, Facebook, Google, larry page, mark zuckerberg, netflix, reed hastings, Search, steve jobs, washington post, Wetpaint, yahoo
by Ben Elowitz
This article was recently published as a guest post at GeekWire, and is republished here for DigitalQuarters readers.
Since Google+ launched in June of this year, two questions have been on everyone’s mind in the digital community: 1) Can it become a huge success for Google? And 2) Can I use it to make huge success for me?
Much has been written about the first question; but very little about the second.
And so, because we’re obsessive about knowing the social Web, my colleagues and I at Wetpaint have looked long and hard at the second (and unanswered) question.
After a good deal of analysis, I can report that the answer for us as a media company (so far, at least) is “no.”
Here’s what we’ve found:
The lights are on, but no one is home – Google has been quick to point out that 40 million users have “signed up” for Google+. That’s because the product is deeply bolted onto every product inside the Google empire, including Gmail, and they did a nice job of making it easy to invite everyone you know. People checked it out, but they haven’t been back, and I’d bet their active user rates are in the single digits. Every time I log in, there’s almost zero activity among my “circles.” Even with 40 million, that pales in comparison to the reach of Facebook’s worldwide audience of 800 million (200 million in the U.S.), who are far more active (500M per day!).
Users can manage one social network, and no more – Mainstream users have demonstrated that they reach saturation after managing one social network when it comes to their personal life. First, it was Friendster; then MySpace; now Facebook. People don’t have the time and attention span to manage overlapping networks of friends and conversations.
It doesn’t solve a consumer problem – There hasn’t been a migration to Google+ because it doesn’t solve a real consumer problem. Facebook has an entrenched audience with deeply embedded habits. In order for a migration to take place, Google+ needs to do something massively new that addresses a consumer pain point (which it doesn’t – at least not yet), or Facebook needs to make a massive blunder that drives people away (for example, around privacy, which I don’t think most users really care about). Overcoming this is even harder for Google, largely because it’s viewed by most as a utility, not a place to facilitate stronger online connections / community.
That said, there are a few things I’ll be watching as Google+ moves ahead in the short term:
Influencers – The people who are using Google+ now (the single digits mentioned above) are industry influencers / luminaries / connectors. They’re using it as a less restricted version of Twitter, because Google+ can share longer, deeper messages than 140 characters will allow. I’ll be curious to see if there’s a migration of these folks from Twitter to Google+. I tend to doubt it, however.
Business pages – Google has encouraged businesses and brands to sit on the sidelines until they release business pages as part of Google+ later this year. These are akin to “fan pages” on Facebook. If these solve a new consumer problem, then they could trigger some migration. But, again, I attach low odds to this possibility.
Search impact – The most convincing argument for embracing Google+ is its potential impact on search. It’s too early to say, but there is speculation that Google will tune its search algorithms to overweight those who “perform” well with Google+. For example, if a brand gets lots of +1’s (Google’s version of the “like” button), then that brand’s share of search volume could be dramatically increased to encourage broader adoption of content providers. This is something I’ll be evaluating after business pages launch, which should take place before the end of the year.
There is no question that the crew at Google is brilliant. And they will clearly be looking to improve their service for consumers and make it relevant as a premier social operating system for the Web. But what I will be watching is whether they can solve these core issues to make it a must-have for consumers. And, if they do, then it will become a must-have for publishers as well.
SOS – The Social Operating System
26 Sep2011
by Ben Elowitz
Facebook F8 has made clear that the digital world is now powered by social operating systems. It’s all changed. The below post was previously published at paidContent, and is republished here for DigitalQuarters readers.
SOS – The Social Operating System
How the Social Web Has Rewired the Digital World From the Ground Up
In the wake of Facebook’s F8 mega-event, with its parade of product, feature, and platform announcements, I’m struck by the recent major inflection that has social networking penetrating more and more completely into our digital lives.
Indeed, social networking has moved from something that’s a destination activity, to something that is ever-present throughout every digital experience. And, no doubt, Facebook will continue this rapid progression.
My awareness that social networks have seriously and profoundly journeyed into our lives began with the startling statistics that I published in June: the searchable Web is shrinking (by 9% in consumers’ monthly time spent over a recent one year period); while the social Web is growing (with a matching 69% increase in time spent on Facebook specifically).
But the change has since intensified, as Facebook’s share of consumer attention has increased even further, and as Web sites the world over race to recruit Facebook “fans” and “likes.”
In addition, the trendline has also become increasingly clear and sharply etched in recent months with the LinkedIn IPO; and with the Google+ Project, as even mighty Google vies for relevance as a social fabric that helps weave our world together.
Putting it all together, I’m seeing a restructuring of the stack: a new layering of how media is created, distributed, and experienced, different from the first generation of the Internet.
It’s the rise of what I’ve come to view as the “social operating system (Social OS).” And I think it changes everything for media and other companies online.
The New Way News Travels
Unlike the analog world, where content and distribution companies have largely fixed channels (licensed spectrum; contracted cable distribution; stable subscription bases; theater outlets; and other distribution power), digital content isn’t channelized. It’s itemized.
That means digital content has to earn an audience – item by item. The first generation of digital media publishers turned to search engine optimization to solve that, with an endless and constantly escalating set of editorial and technical tricks to bait search algorithms to rank them highly. This became de rigeur for every digital publisher; even as it spawned an arms race to find an audience.
But now that social is ubiquitous, the nature of distribution changes for media companies. And now, instead of having to reinvent the distribution wheel every day for every page, publishers can rely on a system far more powerful than the search engine to sort, select, and rank content. That system is part human, and part technology – but it is 100% social.
The Social OS sits at the boundary between content and the people who consume it. It provides a layer of functionality that lets Web companies focus on their unique content and the experiences that they offer – while earning distribution, not via channels, but via people. And, in the process, they earn, not a mechanistic relationship with an algorithm, but a real relationship with their audience.
None of this was possible until very recently.
The Internet was too immature: both in terms of technology, and audience. Indeed, it’s only since this decade started that we’ve had the social network and mobile technology in combination with literally billions of users online; this mix lets people connect to each other, and allows content to flow effortlessly from one consumer to the next.
And it’s this combination of technology (networks like Facebook and Twitter); content (with providers like Apple, NetFlix, and YouTube, not to mention the hundreds of blogs and media companies); and, most significantly, real people online to spread all that goodness, which makes the Social OS work.
The New Common Medium For Transmission
That’s why each Social OS is defined, first and foremost, by who’s on it, and what the connections mean. But beyond that, each social operating system can make identity, personal information and interests, relationships, and other data and actions available to applications. And third, and most importantly, is the role of the Social OS as distributor. Because Social OS’s have transformed the primary navigational coordinates of the Web from document-to-document links to person-to-person, the Social OS becomes the medium for propagation.
As recently as a few years ago, large media companies saw some parts of this wave coming, and they thought the answer was for each of them to build their own proprietary social network. But relationships between people aren’t proprietary to media; rather, they are the conduits through which all media travels.
And that puts in perspective what Mark Zuckerberg recently said, about how media is the next big application for his Facebook Social OS:
“Some of the earliest examples we’ve seen are with games. It just leads to massive disruption. And I think, over the next 2, 3 years, we’re going to start to see that in more and more industries, and the next ones I would expect are going to be media-type industries.”
Or, as we say at my company, Wetpaint, we are becoming the Zynga of publishing, leveraging social operating systems like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to build a powerful media business on top of them.
Reinventing the Media Industry For a Social World
The rise of the social operating system has two implications for old (and even some new) media companies, who are mostly still trying to figure out what to do with all this. If the idea isn’t to be a social network, then how do they use Social OS’s to make their business more successful?
Social maven Jonah Peretti, co-founder of Huffington Post and CEO of BuzzFeed, points out that different social networks specialize in different content: Facebook users share “what you want your friends to think you like … content you can wear as a badge of honor,” while Twitter is a platform for topic curators and wholesalers in the information trade, and LinkedIn has a strictly professional domain.
For its part, YouTube has its own character: with most consumption anonymous, it’s largely an open public repository, and much of the networking that forwards YouTube videos from person to person happens via email, Facebook, and other networks.
And, as Google gets into the fray with its Google+ Project, presumably it is meant to specialize in closed groups, when full public exposure isn’t in order. If it works, it will likely find its best traction in topics like health & wellness, parenting, or certain hobbies.
For media companies, the key is knowing which Social OS’s to bet on; and then tuning content, packaging and distribution for them.
For celebrity entertainment and gossip at Wetpaint, we know Facebook is a natural match for mass consumer promotion. On the other hand, for industry analysis, like my blog posts, I’m not surprised that Facebook is relatively unimportant: for most of my readers, my posts wouldn’t fit in among family photos and Farmville accomplishments. Twitter and LinkedIn do far better for heady topics like the future of media.
High Stakes: The Future of an Industry
The last decade of audience fragmentation and content de-bundling on the Internet has ravaged media, particularly in a world characterized by fierce competition for the love of Google’s robots.
When Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke at a Facebook event in Seattle, he said:
“The last 5 years have been about connecting all these people. The next 5 years are going to be about all the crazy things you can do now that these people are connected, and I think it’s going to be cool.”
In a world powered by social operating systems, the prize is that, when we execute well, we get to be hooked into people’s lives. Media companies can earn constant places in consumers’ newsfeeds, along with a button asking them to consider sharing their experience every time they see us. I think that’s going to be cool.
by Ben Elowitz
One of the most important questions publishers are grappling with today is whether they oversee a media company or a technology company. In the following article, which appeared originally in my Media Success newsletter and was subsequently republished at AllThingsD, I explain why every media company has to be a technology company. Then I offer several keys to success in the current digital environment, which is dominated by the rise and evolution of the new social Web. Please take a read, and let me know what you think.
Two Truths
Let’s start with two truths.
First, publishers need cutting-edge technology to hook an audience through today’s digital media channels of the Web, mobile, social, and search.
And, second, the breakthrough technology can’t just be about product design – it’s got to go beyond to create distribution advantages on the new connected Web.
One Question
Okay, now that we have the truth out of the way, let me ask you a question:
“Is your company a media company, or a technology company?”
I love getting asked this question. And every digital media leader I know hates answering it.
Discomfort, Uneasiness, Anxiety, Fear
The uneasiness begins with the mistaken idea that the two are separable. And they were – back in the 15th century, when Gutenberg first worked his printing magic, and up until a few years ago. But we all know digital technology has inserted itself inextricably into the guts of publishing, replacing ink with bytes and paper with pipes. And now, over the last two years, technology has transformed the basis of publishers’ relationships with their audience, by connecting them through social operating systems, as we discussed last month.
And yet, our uneasiness escalates to anxiety when we realize we still don’t fully understand the new technology’s potential or impact on our business.
That is a scary thought. 
Technology Drives Media
I think we all need to collectively swallow our fear. We know every media company must be a technology company today.
In the first generations of digital media, it was easy. In AOL’s past, technology’s key role was simply to provide basic Internet access over dial-up lines. Today, while that access provides cash flow, it no longer has any strategic value in media. Similarly, Yahoo’s early technology prowess was applied to create significant products like Yahoo Mail. But while Mail still drives 73 percent of the audience to Yahoo’s media properties, it won’t secure Yahoo’s future ability to be a great media destination.
These two companies – as well as the rest of us – need to use technology for something more advanced than access and ancillary products. We need to put it right into the heart of media so that we can create breakthrough user experiences and new connections with audiences.
Millions of Ways to Engage
To do that, let’s start by recognizing what’s changed about the medium itself: In analog days, publishers’ products were two-dimensional; and all we had to work with was ink and some paper. And similarly, distribution was mostly two-dimensional; a subscription list and newsstand sales was all there was to it.
But now, consumers have access to millions of sources at their fingertips, and each one can be rich and interactive, reaching us through several different digital channels. Both our product experiences and our distribution can be much more intricate – and much more valuable. And combining the two gives media the chance to do something it’s always aspired to do before, but never been able to.
The Future Will Be Personalized
We have recently become ready for a whole new vision for media.
And that’s giving every audience member the right content in the right place at the right time.
To do this takes a combination of data – from the social operating system – coupled with media’s greatest power, that of creating experiences and distributing them.
To achieve this, though, we need technology to do more than output HTML pages; instead, it has to chaperone customized content to every individual.
This is a big change from the original Internetization of media, which was, like generations of offline media before it: “If you publish it they will come.” That worked when directories like Yahoo and search engines like Google matched consumers to content. But that attitude was passive; and today’s social Web is anything but. So publishers now have the opportunity – and the challenge – of taking charge of their distribution.
The key is using the emerging social Web to get signals from, and connect to, the audience. And when we do this, we are putting technology in the role of relating uniquely to every consumer in order to create the ultimate experiences they crave.
Now that’s a refreshing concept for media.
Three Ways to Get Ahead
But what does this mean, practically speaking?
I believe the role of technology in media success must embody these three things:
- Use technology to determine the right content – The social Web offers a wealth of real-time data. Use it to see what matters to your constituents. Tools like Newsbeat are helpful moment by moment, and article by article. But you have to go further. The great breakthrough of digital media is being able to connect to your audience as individuals, not just in aggregate. No longer do you have to create for a persona or prototypical user; instead, you can create for real users. Media companies need to develop technologies that give them a proprietary edge when it comes to understanding the specific needs of their potential audience; that way, they can serve consumers better. And the opportunities abound. At Wetpaint, my company, for example, we process Twitter, Facebook, Google, and our own site’s data, all in real-time to know what content matters – and to whom. And yet, we can go much further, to ask and intuit feedback from each user individually. The future is a completely personalized experience from every publisher. It’s not far-fetched; in fact, it mirrors what consumers already patch together with all too much difficulty.
- Take control of your distribution – Reach consumers with the right content at the right time and place (via Web, mobile, video, social, and search). Don’t just have your social media team pump the same content from your Web CMS through Facebook and Twitter. Instead, use technology and research to understand the secrets of what works. Truly engaging your potential audience can improve your results by a factor of two or more.
We’ve already seen this at Wetpaint, and the results are still getting better each week. Our database of everything we publish tracks all the distribution causes and effects, so we know what works. We also pay attention to who the influencers are, with technology that identifies them as well as who their influencers are; and now we’re building a “CRM”-like system to help us know more about these individuals and win them over.
- Package it into the right experiences – Print is static and flat; but so are too many digital media properties. That’s why I applaud The New York Times for continually looking at how to repackage into mobile apps; and that’s why I like Flipboard, which takes a data-rich, but visually cacophonic, content feed and packages it into an immersive experience. AOL’s riff of ultimate personalization has impressed me even more: they’ve recognized that every consumer should get their own Edition – nailing the concept of personalization better than any media approach before. This is the opportunity for each of us now, as we connect with audience members and try to offer them more compelling experiences in return for loyal usage.
Technology Changes Businesses
Let’s circle back to the discussion of whether you’re a media or technology company.
By its very nature, digital publishing is a technical medium. But, beyond that, what makes technology interesting isn’t its ability to carry bits; it’s its ability to change businesses. And we need to change our own by updating our sense of audience, distribution, and experience creation to provide thousands of times more precision than media ever has before.
When we do that, we’re making the content thousands of times more relevant. And I believe that’s how you build a thriving digital media business in the next decade.
by Ben Elowitz
This article was recently featured as a guest post at TechCrunch.
Next year, search advertising will be a $15 billion market in the U.S. alone, growing by 14 percent, according to eMarketer. And, if Facebook can capture half the share of that market that Google has today, it could easily add an extra $25 billion or even far more to its value.
For most any CEO who could have even a modest chance of succeeding at it, that payoff would be reason enough to take a serious look at entering the search category. And yet, while I’m sure he wouldn’t scoff at the extra revenues, profits, or valuation, I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg finds something else far more motivating than just increasing the financial value of his company.
And that’s what will propel him next year to make a completely disruptive entry into the search category.
So if it’s not for the financial value, then why am I so certain that Mark Z. will make a play for Google’s home turf?
It’s because it’s so irresistibly good for his users. And that’s the most important principle that seems to guide his product development.
The Five Reasons For Facebook To Enter Search
With that in mind, here are the five specific reasons why Facebook should enter search next year:
1) To make Facebook the ultimate home page. Consumers make Facebook their home base. Half log in every day; and users come to Facebook 70 percent more times per day than even to Google. They stay twice as long as even users of Yahoo’s vast network of email, content, and more. Facebook has become the Connected Web’s de facto operating system. But right now, its “start button” is limited to what other people put in your newsfeed. Part of being home base is being a launching pad to go anywhere you want. So Zuckerberg will need to give users a great connection to the rest of the Web – whatever their intent.
2) To fix a broken feature. Facebook has a search feature today (powered by Bing); and a few people already use it for Web-wide search, even though it isn’t very good. It needs significant upgrading, and Zuckerberg knows it. Having a feature this important be this incomplete creates an unacceptable user experience. It must be fixed.
3) To improve people’s life online. Facebook has an enormous data set that it can use to deliver better search results than anyone on the planet. Facebook can see everything that Google can see in terms of pages and links, but with a whole extra dimension of human connection that is impenetrable to Google. Facebook knows what your friends like, and what people like you like. And it knows the difference between real interest and spam. Translating that knowledge into great results will improve online life for his users.
4) To fully connect the world. More than anything, Zuckerberg and his company’s DNA are all about providing services to connect users to each other and, increasingly, to the world at large. Serendipity and sharing aren’t enough: sometimes people know what they want to find. Facebook must have a search feature to fully enable connection.
5) To add to his immense data set. Search will not only help users; its users will help Facebook. Specifically, it will provide Facebook with even more data about what people want so Facebook can further personalize itself for everyone. Go ahead and cue the creepy privacy music, but remember that so far most users have been happy to make a privacy tradeoff to get valuable personalized service.
With Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and Like buttons, Facebook has already shown its vision to fully connect to the rest of the Web. The next step is to help people better access it.
Facebook: The Social Operating System For Connected Lives
Facebook began as a social application, but it’s now in the process of becoming a Social Operating System for the Web at large. Offering world-class search is the next step in its evolution as that “Social OS.” The Web is now organized around connected people, not documents – and Facebook is the OS that links those people together.
Once fully connected, can you imagine how Zuckerberg must think about a Web all wired-in through Facebook’s central hub? He’d know the time spent on every page; the usefulness of every link; the patterns of every user. He’d have a real-time system that provides feedback on every recommendation. You know what’s cooler than a billion connections on the Web? How about a quadrillion!
The value of that data will be immense in making recommendations to users, serving advertisers, refining search itself, and enabling next-generation social applications. It will give Facebook a competitive advantage over every other Internet company in building a map of where the gold is buried – in the form of the content each individual user wants – among the trillions of pages on the Web. But more importantly, it will allow Zuckerberg to serve his users.
“Social Search” Is More Than Just Links From Your Friends
The idea of a socially-powered search is not brand new for Facebook. Bing and Blekko have both incorporated features that bring your friends’ Facebook content into the search results. And while that is one modest way to improve the search, its impact pales in comparison to the full potential of what Facebook can do to help you by fully exploiting its social data set: It can individualize search results just for you, by using not only data about you and your friends, but by using the full dataset of people you haven’t even met yet.
Let’s look at it competitively. Google and Bing have, with limited exceptions, held themselves to the standard that the results should be the same for everyone because they work in an anonymous environment. A friend from Microsoft tells me that Bing has a rule that, with the exception of bucket tests, the top ranked result must be the same for everyone. This rule, he says, was copied from Google – where it fits well with Google’s increasing positioning of itself as the great defender of identity control, compared to Facebook’s ethos where everything is public. But that differentiation hands Facebook an incredible opportunity: in the Facebook environment, it’s not only accepted but expected that everything you do is customized for you alone.
Can you imagine the power of combining Amazon-like personalization with Facebook’s deep dataset to offer better results?
Facebook Can Redefine Search in a Social World
That’s why beyond just improving a search algorithm, Facebook’s greater opportunity is in redefining the category. The last decade of Web use has been defined by Google’s clean white splash page with a single query field, and the 10 blue links which follow. But just as that approach from Google displaced the prior generation’s directory pages, it’s time for a breakthrough experience. And Facebook is the natural player to provide it.
I’m sure the engineers at Facebook are already visualizing what search could be in a fully connected world. Searches could be proactive, prompted by items shared by friends, rather than awaiting a text field completion. Searches can favor brands and publications that you like, or your friends like. But most importantly, searches can be predicted based on people like you, people who are located where you are, or people with similar interests, profiles, and behaviors, without you ever even knowing them. All of these are ways that Facebook can fundamentally redefine search, thanks to its knowledge of each user’s identity, interests, and behaviors.
How It Could Happen in 2012
But building a search engine that takes (a difference-making) advantage of the social graph takes lots of time and money, as does building a new operational infrastructure, Web crawler, and advertising engine to support it. And, even more significantly, this is one where Zuckerberg will need to get the privacy implications right from the start. Facebook is currently building its rep with major advertisers on its social network – and that’s a great start, because that will provide a captive customer base to transition into its search engine right at launch.
A competitive search engine is one of the most ambitious projects you can imagine – the degree of difficulty is mind-boggling, and the cost is hundreds of millions or more. For Facebook to best Google, it would need to catch up in substantial ways before it could shoot ahead of the leader, even with its valuable dataset. But that’s only an impossible challenge if it has to do it all alone.
And Facebook doesn’t have to.
It already has an alliance with the #2 player in search, Microsoft. And – in the way of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – it has a common interest in outperforming Google. And Facebook and Microsoft have enough separation between their businesses that they could complement each other rather than compete. Indeed, Facebook’s increasing strength in its advertising engine could be a huge lift to Bing’s struggling monetization – offering hope of raising Bing’s monetization toward Google’s levels. The two truly are more valuable together, and it’s no surprise that smart people have begun to speculate on a Bing-Facebook combination, a step beyond a partnership. Working with Bing for its search entry could save Facebook billions of dollars of initial R&D and speed its entry into the category by years – and by many dozens of engineers. And any agreement they’d sign would likely still give Facebook the option to create its own search engine down the road.
The Chilling Threat To Facebook’s Enemy
Regardless of how Facebook structures its efforts – and with whatever degree of help it gets from Microsoft – it will be able to create a search capability that will be significantly different from anything we’ve ever seen. And it will shake the tectonic plates underneath Google’s Mountain View headquarters, even as it vies to earn users’ adoption with better, more personalized results.
Google will not perish in the digital earthquake without a fight, though. Its recent Google+ launch, for example, shows just how boldly Google intends to enter Facebook’s home territory. That, of course, makes it even more imperative for Facebook to counter-invade by pushing into search.
Looking forward, it’s clear that search and social won’t always occupy separate spaces. Indeed, for consumers, over time, they will converge; and the blended (or, just as likely, reimagined) product that emerges will serve as a home base that will serve as a jumping-off point to everything that’s important and relevant on the 21st century Web.
It’s fascinating, and it’s all about to unfold. In the meantime, while Zuckerberg quietly forges ahead, and readies Facebook’s game-changing search entry, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, is publicly lamenting lost opportunities to catch Facebook. The diverging fortunes of these two digitally defining companies could not be more apparent right now.