In the Cut and Paste Era, Traffic Happens Elsewhere
Imagine for a moment that you can take any piece of online content that you care about - a news feed, an image, a box score, multimedia, a stream of updates from your friends - and easily pin it wherever you want. Once clipped, you can drop the content on your desktop, an online start page like Windows Live or Pageflakes, “the deck" of your mobile device or even “a crawl” on your Internet-connected television.
This isn’t some far off vision. It’s the near-term future. It’s the coming era of the Cut and Paste Web.
All of the building blocks of the Cut and Paste Web are in place today. They include RSS, widgets, APIs, Javascript embed codes and web services. If you use a personalized start page, you’re already believer. For a sample, check out my Netvibes page, below. You’ll notice that it not only includes news, blogs and social network streams but also images and embedded iPhone versions of Web pages that snap in perfectly.
However, for all of its benefits, the Cut and Paste Web is potentially more disruptive to big traffic sites than Web 2.0 was. If almost all content can be lifted from one spot and placed somewhere where it’s more convenient to the user, just how will it be monetized? The ramifications reach far and wide. It will impact anyone that wants to attract eyeballs - media companies, brand marketers and community/social networking sites.
This week in my AdAge column, I outline three strategies for thriving in the era of a decentralized web. The rest of the column follows. I have written about this before, but it won't be the last time. You will be hearing a lot more about this subject in the months ahead. Now is the time to be ready. All you need to do is remember three little words: "traffic happens elsewhere."
Three Strategies for Thriving on the Decentralized Web
As Long-form Content Becomes Bite-Size, Make Everything on Your Site Embeddable
The Long Tail of content and increasing demands for our attention have created a perfect storm where traffic to brand sites may soon shrink. It's simple supply-and-demand economics at work.
Long-form online content has been usurped by all things bite-size, whether it be widgets, YouTube clips, or micro blogs powered by services such as Tumblr, Jaiku and Twittergram. This column offers three simple steps marketers should consider to thrive in a web that is increasingly becoming decentralized.
Think web services, not websites. Most innovation online today is created by an army of talented, independent web developers. Sites such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook are turning themselves into platforms that can run these applications, almost like Windows did on the desktop. This has spawned hundreds of miniature online applications.
To thrive, marketers need to think about how to create similar mini experiences via web services that plug into these sites yet are consistent with the brand.
Connect people. The web is transforming into a medium where the greatest value is created when people connect via platforms of participation around a common goal -- to make money, be entertained or informed, to create, etc.
To thrive, brands need to identify these motivations and participate in these new micro-content platforms in a way that helps consumers meet their goals. For example, the Los Angeles Fire Department recognized that consumers actively use Twitter when disaster strikes. It has opened a channel on the site to provide updates at twitter.com/LAFD.
Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer's desktop. This is a big sign of things to come.
In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.
