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The one thing you can’t buy

Theres a saying (and a song!) that says that money can’t buy you love.  Now we’ve all seen those “massage parlours” in certain cities around the world so it may not be strictly true.  Of course your definition of love is all important here, money can buy you certain types of love, but not the type that you can live with.  So where on earth is my point here?  Well quite simply, if you’ve got a startup throwing money at marketing isn’t going to cut it.  I’m sure many of you have seen the Supernova 12 and are aware that over 100 startups applied, thats alot.  So how are these companies going to gain success?  I’m sure that one of the points you picked up on regarding the Supernova 12 is the huge amount of investment they have received.  These aren’t back room one-man-band organisations, they are big with momentum and cash behind them.  With that comes advertising, marketing and promotion.  Whats this got to do with love?  Well not much, really, its more about another emotion that we tend to keep fairly close to our chest, and thats trust.

I’ve written previously about how contextual and CPC advertising has opened up new revenue streams and I’ve also written about the frightening amount of information some sites (and more specifically organisations) hold about you.  I mentioned in the previous article that many of these organisations gather your information in somewhat covert means, their advantage is that they are established with popular services.  The problem with the start-ups is that they don’t have an established user base and they don’t have the popular services.  This may seem obvious but when you think about it, theres a fairly substantial hurdle to overcome.  Remember that this is all about personal information, information that you don’t necessarily want to give away, and you certainly don’t want to give it away without getting something good in return.  This is somehing that has only recently occured to me.  Now that many people, coincidently the same people who are at the cutting edge and go for startups, are aware that their information is valuable there is a growing reluctance to hand it over.  Surely this is another prime reason as to why advertising which requires little or no commitment is more often than not the driver behind web applications.  There is also an increasing number of services which offer up a large chunk of their service for free, and then tempt you in with that little bit extra…

Lets look at an example, digg.com, which is a social news network we’ve all heard of.  If you are not a digg user you can still head on over to their site and see whats currently being dugg, whats popular in each area (and historically) and whats upcomming.  None of this requires any commitment in the form of a signup.  Note that they will still serve you advertising, of course.  With digg, like many of these services, non-registered users get a read only view of the system.  You can see whats on the homepage but if you want to influence it, then you have to sign up.  This applies to services like flickr and youtube as well, you can view all you like but if you want to contribute, then you have to sign up.  Its a very clever model as it is targetted at both passive, annonymous users as well as those that are signed up, and it exploits the behaviours of each.  This means that ultimately, even if you can’t buy trust you can still exploit those who don’t trust you.

This post was written on Wednesday, July 5th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under Opinion , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

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