Lessons from the Internet's Early Days
Gary Vaynerchuk once said:
“We’re living through the biggest culture shift of our lives, the internet has dawned the second wave of industrial revolution”.
The fascinating part is that the bell curve of innovation is running at such an accelerated speed that another great wave of innovation is taking place within the same generation, and probably for the first time ever.
At a historical scale, this is even more significant when you realize that it took centuries for people to start using tools, even more centuries to start using basic machinery… Hell, it even took hundreds of years to make the jump to electricity from candles and torches.
At now look at us, our grandparents used to go watch a movie in a big screen once a month and that was considered a luxury that not everybody could afford.
In our parents generation, everybody had a television set at home and that was already an enormous advancement from the prior generation.
Back then, there were only a handful of channels, but when that thing just came out… It seemed like the mother of all inventions.
Then came the VCR player and everyone could go to the store and pick any movie they wanted to watch, and they could enjoy it on their own time.
Today you can do that with a simple click.
Hell, you can do that from your home while chilling on your couch and eating pizza.
Most impressive of all is that not only the devices got cheaper and more accessible, but the content creation tools got cheaper and more accessible as well.
So much so that, even your next door neighbor could be filming videos and uploading them on YouTube as we speak.
But the biggest jump in innovation came with the emergence of the internet, the second wave of innovation as Gary said.
And now we’re at the dawn of the third wave, and the experiences of living through something so revolutionary as the internet are still fresh in mind.
Which means that blockchain companies have a plethora of lessons from the internet era.
Let me give you one example:
When PayPal came around, they didn’t just start handing out flyers in the street trying to attract customers, they looked for people who were already on the internet, and more importantly people who were already comfortable with making monetary transactions online.
So they did their research and got their targets from eBay.
The same goes for Airbnb for example, they found their targets on Craigslist.
Why? Because they already knew that these were the perfect audience since the they all had properties they wanted to rent out. These were the types of audience who are actually in need of the very service that Airbnb provides.
And then once you get the base audience, it’s easier to build your snowball from there.
So maybe to emulate the success of some internet giants from the early days of the internet, Blockchain entreprises should to take a page or two from their recipe book.
In the past months, there have been millions of users actively closing their Facebook accounts which makes them the ideal audience for any blockchain social website. You know that these people have been longing for a competition for a long time, you just have to present it to them.
The same opportunity occurs with YouTube as well, given the fact that content creators are being de-monetized faster than a factory worker under a soviet regime.
For any blockchain video streaming service, this is a gold mine.
Especially nowadays where you have the tools to analyze users via influence, follower count, true reach… You could even figure out exactly how much they make in donations in Patreon and factor in the “need” aspect in the equation.
This gets even more valuable if we’re talking about a platform that rewards content creators with cryptocurrency.
All you need to do is target the right people, make them happy, involve them in a mutually beneficial situation and their followers will follow.
As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book The Tipping Point:
“There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.”
Hey so glad I found you here! You're speaking my language, exactly. All of the people who have been displaced by big social's shenanigans (the nice way of putting it) need a new home. I'm part of a team working on a new project (friendly to non-crypto people) that puts control back in the hands of the people. Project is called Narrative (https://narrative.org); I'd be honored if you'd check us out and tell me what you think!
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That's a nice comparison right there haha.
I don't really understand how can google demonetize so many youtubers? It doesn't make sense to me. But as you say in the article, this can be good for blockchain based video sites like dtube.
They are in such a market position where they can. Youtube is the place to be for video content creators, everyone knows it, and it's just like google.
@dedicatedguy as @igster mentionned they are in a position where they can, and Google's main income isn't YouTube especially if they want to dominate the data war, they would try to control the narrative and influence.
This mass demonitization has been going on for a while and even addressed by some of the biggest Youtubers like Piewdepie, Dave Franco, Casey Neistat..etc.
But as you said, this could be a good opportunity for competing sites. :)
Perhaps you could advice DTube on some agressive marketing methods, not sure if they're waiting for their platform to be more polished or what but I think there's been zero outreach so far from them outside the Steem sphere.
And as you mentioned, there's many big time youtubers that have been demonitized, these people should be the first target of any outreach. Plain and simple. DTube could even offer them guaranteed exposure through their own delegated SP for period of time.
We can't just be passive, sit on our asses and hope for someone to find our services. Marketing is lucrative business for a reason. But many of our dev teams are just that, devs. We need more marketing people and those who can come up with good business strategy.
I'm sure they will, I don't know when but it seems inevitable. As you said, marketing is a lucrative business and it's very necessary, you're right. So I assume that sooner or later it will become a priority.
Excellent derivation, Adil.
With regards to the crypto markets, this would probably mean that we'd do well focussing on those who're already part of, intead of trying to get more people involved at this early stage.
I often wonder what would happen if we could retain all users that have ever signed up to Steem and make them become mulipliers of the idea and ambassadors of the blockchain.
Thanks Marly!
Actually I didn't mean people who are already part of the blockchain but for a social media sites on the blockchain to target de-satisfied Facebook users, for video streaming platforms to do the same with YouTube... Instead of launching ads at random. :P
About the multipliers idea, I like it :) now I'm wondering about that as well haha
Oh yes, now in times where many fear their own data to be sold, the blockchain has even more selling propositions. Fully agreed.
I guess the classic FB user will move when their friends and family has moved, so it'll require a gradual migration process, starting with the most influential ones.
It'd be great to have someone famous who already left FB as an ambassador speaking for new solutions, someone like Woody Harrelson for instance:
I remember we both appreciate his performance as an actor a lot, so I wonder how cool it'd be to have him around here :-)
The next revolution in internet...
i am going to try to call the interconnects.
Will be here shortly. And it will change the entire paradigm.
I envision everyone having wall servers. Each person posts their pictures / text to their server, and then allow whom they want to see it.
Then there will be competing wall viewers / aggregators.
Like the block chain, it is turning centralization inside-out.
The interconnects, that sounds interesting. So you mean in the same way that everyone controls their keys and not remain at the mercy of third party, the interconnects allows everyone to have home servers with encryption and bypass centralization all together?
That sounds fascinating @builderofcastles now you're making me think haha
Yep, that is what i mean.
The hardest part, to me, is that the internets are built on client-server models. Almost nothing is peer-to-peer.
We don't have a model for working discovery.
Like, currently we have Skypee and you get people's usernames you want to contact, and the Skypee server does the connection.
What might work... really work, is that you give out your public key, like you give out your BTC key... like you would give out your phone number and then the interconnects connects you.
Unless the interconnects broadcasts to everyone, the underlying infastructure / data-structure doesn't exist. ICANN is really simple to set up, really complex to continue to grow. This, what i am looking for will probably be really simple to grow and thinking-up-block-chain hard to set up.
I often see Steemit pitched as an alternative to facebook but I don't think most average facebook users would be interested in switching to Steemit (as a replacement anyway). Content creators, sure, but not the average user. Facebook is still a better place to share pics and chat with friends and family. Steemit just isn't set up for that kind of interaction. Steemit is more like blogger or wordpress or reddit. It's just a different use case. Future hard forks may of course change that.
Now as DTube matures, it COULD become a viable replacement for Youtube. It already is for some but it has a ways to go still to match their feature set and ease of use.
You may be right on the Facebook comparisons but I wouldn't be surprise if we have some similar platforms on the steem blockchain some day.
And yeah for something like DTube the comparisons are closer.
Yes, the blockchain certainly COULD replace platforms like facebook but I don't think there is anything yet. Some of the planned changes for the steem blockchain in the future bring it a little closer.
We all have to adopt to the change that's the big thing i have learnt those who don't respect time simply time don't respect internet was revolution in the history of mankind making things more connected than ever similarly blockchain is now the early adopters will find more new ways to explore :)
Yeah you're right! Plus now we have the opportunity to learn from those who resisted the internet back in the day, especially since the internet came not too long ago... Or maybe I'm getting old :P