An awesome (hilarious) look at the bike market for fixies and hipsters. The chart documents where there is a strong market for fix gear bikes vs. where all of the hipsters hang out.
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Nice and smooth track from Goldroom. http://pco.lt/xtuxGB
I’ve seen a lot of pontification around what Twitter should offer as an ad model and 90% of what I’ve seen is about putting advertising into Twitter; that’s not a good enough idea. It’s certainly interesting and aligns with the model we’ve had for so long that content should be surrounded by ads, but it’s not going to be valuable for Twitter or the advertiser in the long run and it certainly won’t take advantage of Twitter’s greatest asset; the shared link. It’s painfully basic, but newspapers put ads around stories, commercials use 7 minutes of each half hour and the web has uses pixels to place ads around content on URLs. The model hasn’t changed. But it can and should, media can be sold now to audiences based on how they arrive; time-shifted audiences should get different ads served on their DVRs, imagine the premium that could be sold on the first and last spot in a segment, most people end up playing half of each ad because they can’t stop the fast forward on time (I am one of them). Web audiences should get different ads based on where they come from, not where they sit or who we guess they are. For example, if my mother shares a link with me I’m apt to click on it because I trust her and I’m also inclined to like the content before I arrive and thus I’ll spend more time with it. Why not charge a brand a premium for this arrival? Twitter can help get this done. I believe for twitter, putting 140 characters from a brand between 140 characters from friends and news sources is no different than the three conventional models above and not all that interesting. Let Brands become interesting and publish to their followers on their own, don’t force the messaging, it’s an old model and not all that good. What should Twitter do? How can they provide value to brands and also take advantage of the fundamental beauty of twitter and the trust we have with each other’s shared links? Twitter should call an ad exchange, provide them with all of their referral traffic and allow an exchange to sell “trusted” audiences to their clients at a premium, splitting the profits (“sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent” – Hans Gruber). Just a thought.
You may ask what the hell do clothespins have to do with the web and more specifically content? I’ll explain. When you pass by a farm, what is the first thing you do? (Other than the “who farted?” jokes which are only funny when you still rode the yellow bus). If you’re like me you probably look at the barn and draw an immediate conclusion about the success of farm based on the quality of the barn. Does it need paint? Are the windows broken? Is half the roof bowing in? My Uncles pulled the windows from their barn within the last 10 years because the cows produced such an excess of heat that would make the building too warm for optimal milk production. But from the road, you’d think a lack of windows means the farmer didn’t have it all together. To really gauge; we would have to look at how the farmer understands his cattle and ultimately how his knowledge leads to a successful milkroom, not just the paint outside. How is this similar to content? Too often we still look at portals and big properties and assign them an importance or quality based on the siding of their barn and never look at how the cows (content) plays a role. This leads us to the clothespins. Walking into the Livingston Farms barn at any time from when I first could, early 80 to as recently as the mid-90’s, all of the cows were tracked with numbers, names and clothespins to denote who the were. What my uncles were trying to achieve was an understanding of milk production, production cycles, how to invest in each cow (via feed) and also when it was time to pull them off of the line to re-impregnate them again to start the cycle over. There were red clothespins over the best producing cows, blue for cows that were middle of the road and then some yellow tags for the under-producing or young cows. With a glance one could easily know which feed to give them (richer feed to boost production, leaner feed of a different corn / mineral mix for the other cows) as well as how much they could expect while milking. This simple system, based on monitoring and assigning a value or Production Rank to each cow allowed my uncles to optimize their barn, they knew all cows weren’t equal and they treated them as such, optimizing the system. The leap to how this is similar to content is strikingly simple. Content functions much the same way; there are content types that thrive with the proper investment (share tools [blogs], platforms [Mobile Apps], niche social graphs [4chan], etc), performers who thrive no matter the conditions and then the underperforming longtail (see Greghay.com). In the content world there are few red clothespins and understandably they often require more feed, but produce in accordance. Red clothespins are typically influencers within a field and can create shifts in a space with breaking news or a biting opinion piece. Every barn needs a few reds if for nothing else than to set the bar for the rest. While it’s understood they sometime have quirks and may kick if you get to close with the shovel or lick your shirtsleeve while you’re making the rounds (ed note: personal LEAST favorite move a cow can make) they are essential to production. Blue clothespins are the most interesting; they are maturing in their own right and often haven’t found the right stride (feed mix, exercise, haven’t had a second calf, etc.). This set is often where the most success can be had, with the right tools (Facebook Like, Twitter Buttons) these content types can thrive and find their own rhythm. It takes a little more structure to get blue to work, but it can be immensely successful with a little thought. Yellow content has a place too, for my Uncles it was often on trailer the next time the guy who hauled bulls and dried up cows to auction came by, because space was limited and they couldn’t invest in more stalls for little return. Content is no different, on a limited budget or where optimization isn’t a concern/goal, long tail content would totally produce milk. You’d just need a barn a mile long. Getting back to how we transition from static to the flow, over the past 20 years Uncle’s farm matured along with the web. Livingston Farms is no longer a single barn with a stall assigned to each cow, instead there are two barns, a production one and a dry one. The production barn only houses cows that are being milked; each is assigned a stall, fed on schedule and milked three times a day. The dry barn on the other hand is a free-stall and the cows can come and go, each one is no different or more/less important than the next because they don’t need to be optimized, they’re not doing anything other than eating and well…. you know. The web has developed the same way; portals no longer dictate behavior and URLs don’t have a place in the sense that you get to them by walking down the line and saying hello in the morning. The web has changed so every single user now has a barn system that serves as a filter, allowing dry cows (every URL on the web) to roam free until called upon (shared through the social graph, read through habit, found through search, etc.). URLs and that pack of 400 Holsteins in Upstate New York are very alike, the filters we choose to apply ensure it’s just Reds and Blues that make it to us and the dry cows in the free-stall barn remain out on the rest of the web until the time when a filter may present them to us. The distinct opportunity this gives farmers (marketers, content producers) is knowing that no longer does every cow (URL) need to be provided real estate in the form of a stall (pixels on a portal) to be productive. Instead the smart farmer will know that optimizing for blues and using some reds will not only place his cows in better barns but more as well.
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