Unless the comedy writers who FREE the most data will win
Re: Unless
From a 2013 article in The New York Times:
[Tim] O’Reilly is a publisher and a well-known visionary in Silicon Valley . . .
[O]ne thing seems certain, O’Reilly says. In the end, “the guy who has the most data, wins.”
Re: my qualifications to envision said alternative to O’Reilly’s formulation
From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon.com’s first Director of Personalization:
Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have — it’s fascinating stuff.
From a 2004 email sent to me by an analyst at top venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson:
Hi Frank, Thanks for your time today. If you would like to provide us with further information about your [business] plan, we would be happy to review it in more detail.
From a 1998 email sent to me by the then Manager of the Learning Sciences and Technology Group at Microsoft Research:
Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the “originator” within the first eighteen months.
Summary of my case for said alternative (details follow)
Winning equates to leveraging the burgeoning sciences of human reproduction to set a new record for most offspring (i.e., to break the record held by Genghis Khan).
A likely key to breaking Khan’s record is establishing the most popular online market for customized education (CE).
A likely key to establishing the Amazon of CE is launching and popularizing an implementation of the next-gen variant of LinkedIn I’ve designed. (I’ve “open sourced” the design at PostRomCom.com.)
For a startup:
A likely key to establishing the most popular implementation of said design is running marketing, site-user showcasing, and fundraising as a profit center.
A likely key to maximizing these profits is producing a “startup comedy” that:
- is a serial (e.g., launches as a serial novel)
- turns readers/listeners/viewers into equity-crowdfunders (i.e., part-owners) of the company
- raises awareness of the company’s (coming) implementation of said design
- showcases site users
- earns profits directly (e.g., via advertising, product placement)
- spins off complementary startup comedies
A key to producing an ideal “1.0” startup comedy is maximizing the likability of the (founder-)CEO’s comic persona.
A key to maximizing this likability is making it company policy that site users control their data (e.g., users receive 100% of the profits when they consent to sales of their data).
A precedent for startup comedy
From the December 8, 2015 issue of a newsletter about podcasts:
Gimlet, your friendly neighborhood podcasting company that narrates its own emergence [on its podcast titled Startup] . . .
[A]ccording to the Startup episode that dropped last Thursday, Graham Holdings invested $5 million into the $6 million round [raised by Gimlet], with the remainder split between some existing investors upping their commitment and a crowdfunded pool [via Startup listeners] that was mediated through Quire, the equity crowdfunding platform [my emphasis] . . .
Re: my design of a next-gen variant of LinkedIn
Key features:
- a particular type of online market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs)
- a particular type of virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)
Prices in this virtual currency will contain/reflect only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research (3659 citations as of October 10, 2016). So prices in the virtual currency will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for people who best complement each other to identify one another.
Re: my planned implementation of the design
The site will be named Adver-ties.
Precedents for Adver-ties
- Google’s PageRank search algorithm (first use of hyperlinks to inform search results)
- Peer assessments associated with popular MOOCs
PageRank 1.0 was based on insights from social network analysis that were decades old when PageRank was conceived.
Number of search engines launched before Google: 20.
From 2013 paper “Tuned Models of Peer Assessment in MOOCs,” co-authored by several employees of MOOC startup Coursera:
Peer assessment — which has been historically used for logistical, pedagogical, metacognitive, and affective benefits . . . — offers a promising solution that can scale the grading of complex assignments in courses with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students.
Re: users of Adver-ties will be able to parlay a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in virtual currency into cash via sales of (other) ad spaces, and via subscriptions
From a September 5, 2016 article on AdWeek.com:
[B]loggers have become legitimate influencers across almost all industries, affecting consumer decisions beyond purchasing by acting as both tastemaker and trusted friend. And a large fan base is no longer a requirement for influencers. More recently, brands have been turning to micro-influencers, bloggers with less than 100,000 followers, to better target consumers.
From a February 2, 2015 article on GigaOm.com:
Ben Thompson launched his site, Stratechery, in April of last year as a fairly unknown blogger — certainly not a household name, even in tech circles — with a tiered “freemium” subscription plan that was based primarily on long, analytical blog posts and a daily newsletter with similar content.
Within about six months, he had over a thousand subscribers paying him $100 a year for access to his newsletter (the shorter daily posts on the website are free). That meant an annual revenue run-rate of about $100,000 — enough to make it a living, along with some speaking and consulting . . .
Thompson says that he just passed the 2,000-subscriber mark, which means he now has a revenue run-rate of about $200,000 a year (the “churn” rate, or the rate at which subscribers drop off, is less than 10 percent he said). And this proves a niche model that serves a specific interest group will work, Thompson argues — as well or better than a model that relies on mass advertising revenue.
. . . [Andrew] Sullivan’s own success helps prove this case as well: in just a year, the Daily Dish blogger managed to convince more than 30,000 subscribers to contribute money, and by last year was pulling in close to $1 million in revenue solely from subscriptions. That may look sad compared to the revenues of a site like BuzzFeed or Vox, but it’s an amazing success for a small blog.
Futurism re: Adver-ties
From 2013 book Who Owns the Future?, by Jaron Lanier:
A tiny website with no financing, but just the right design at just the right time, just might grow like Facebook did, changing the world. It might be something like a social network where people are encouraged to pay each other for contributions from the very start [e.g., using virtual currency to buy each other’s ad spaces]. . . . [The] startup can introduce a new template for personal activity that can evolve to have the key benefits of a job even though it isn’t called a job.
. . . Ordinary people will initially start to earn a little when others are interested by their tweets, blogs, social network updates, videos, and the like. This will not in itself generate enough business to transform the economy, but it will serve a crucial transitional, educational function. People will become used to the idea of looking online for opportunities to earn real wealth.
. . . From a Wall Street perspective, the heretofore unacknowledged but valuable contributions of ordinary individuals will finally be counted in the cloud. That will mean that finance can be built on all that people do to create value in the network age. Suddenly investors will be making money from having bet on a confederacy of bloggers . . .
Time magazine named Jaron Lanier one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. His 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. In 2005 Lanier was selected as one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. From 1997 to 2001 Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2. From 2001 to 2004 he was a Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics. He was a Scholar at Large for Microsoft from 2006 to 2009, and has been a Partner Architect at Microsoft Research from 2009 forward.
Re: comedy
From a 2013 article on Neilsen.com:
From the July 2014 report by Yahoo and Tumblr, in partnership with Razorfish and Digitas, titled “Content Marketing: Best Practices Among Millennials”:
From 1999 book The Entertainment Economy:
The Big Four networks can charge an average of 35 percent more for a thirty-second spot on a situation comedy than one on a drama.
Re: a likely key to breaking Khan’s record is establishing the Amazon of CE via popularizing (a variant of) Adver-ties
From 2004 book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World:
Genghis Khan’s empire connected and amalgamated the many civilizations around him into a new world order.
. . . As he smashed the feudal system of aristocratic privilege and birth, he built a new and unique system based on individual merit, loyalty, and achievement. He took the disjointed and languorous trading towns along the Silk Route and organized them into history’s largest free-trade zone. He lowered taxes for everyone, and abolished them altogether for doctors, teachers, priests, and educational institutions.
. . . The only permanent structures Genghis Khan erected were bridges. Although he spurned the building of castles, forts, cities, or walls, as he moved across the landscape, he probably built more bridges than any ruler in history.
. . . The Mongols deliberately opened the world to a new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge.
More re: comedy writers who FREE the most data may win
Online at PostRomCom. Form of the write-up: a product of my focus since 2006 on learning how to run marketing and site-user showcasing as a profit center. More precisely, learning how to manage an analytics-savvy variant of Alloy Entertainment, a book packager and television-programming producer that was acquired for $100M in 2012.
From the You-Guessed-It Department: PostRomCom.com presents the first startup comedy.
Thoughts? Questions? Bug reports?
Bug fixes? :-)
Let me know below.
Best,
Frank Ruscica
