The Pains of Creating and Selling Digital Content Today

eBay users are already buying and selling copious amounts of user-generated content. But consider the pain of this experience:
We developed this table to give us a framework for thinking about the problems we're really solving with Yepic. What do you think? Is there something missing?

Web 2.0 and the Changing Face of Digital Content

Someone recently asked me to define the term Web 2.0.

For starters, I really like Tim O'Reilly's definition of the term. Wikipedia's page is also good. Both note how Web 2.0 is less about something new and more about the fuller realization of the web's true potential. This realization, contents O'Reilly, gravitates around several core themes: Specifically:

1. The Web as platform.
2. Harnessing collective intelligence
3. Data is the next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models

I should write a post on how Yepic is, in each of these respects, a Web 2.0 company. But in this post I want to focus on what O'Reilly calls "data" and what we call "digital content." To better illustrate, let me quote O'Reilly's article:

"Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers."

O'Reilly's primary argument here is that no company can create sustainable competitive advantage out of commoditized data. MapQuest became irrelevant because they leased and resold data that other businesses (Google Maps, for example) could also lease and resell. Amazon, on the other hand, has become an unquestioned authority in publishing because they took the ubiquitous ISBN registry and extended it with tons of user-contributed data.

O'Reilly's argument focuses on businesses that operate individual web-sites, but I think there's a parallel line of thought here that applies to individual purveyors of digital content (like people who compose and sell their own copyrighted content), as well. In Web 1.0 days, the content you created was fundamentally limited in terms of openness, richness, and accessibility. In terms of openness, it was very difficult to collaborate with others, and this meant your content couldn't benefit from the collective intelligence that's become a hallmark of Web 2.0. In terms of richness, you could have text and grapics, or video and audio, but it was difficult to easily incorporate all of those into one piece of content. In terms of accessibility, Web 1.0 content was anything but. You had to download, install additional software, email, burn to CD, or print, and then you had to deal with all the version issues that came with those distribution and consumption models. If the author made a change to the content, it was very difficult to get it to all the consumers.

Web 2.0 content has improved dramatically in each of these regards:

Openness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally closed, Web 2.0 information is fundamentally open . . . to collaboration, contribution, review, updates, etc.

Richness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally flat and lacked integration across different types of media, Web 2.0 content is fundamentally rich and seamlessly integrates text, graphics, images, video, audio, widgits, etc.

Accessibility: Whereas Web 1.0 content was difficult to access, particularly in update scenarios, Web 2.0 content is always current and just one click away.

In the same way that business models that rely on commoditized data find themselves under enormous competitive pressure that pushes them into a state of irrelevance, content entrepreneurs that fail to embrace these new content characteristics will also find themselves, and their content, fading into oblivion. Closed, flat, inaccessible content is a dying breed.

With that in mind, we created Yepic not just a platform for for-profit self-publication, but as a platform for for-profit self-publication of true Web 2.0 content.

Missionaries, Recreators, and Capitalists

We've spent some time thinking about who creates UGC on the web, and we've come up with the following 3 categorizations:

1. Missionaries. These are the very, very active UGC contributors who write for the sake of benefiting humanity. Their content shows up in blogs, Q&A sites, and wikis. Wikipedia has largely been a success due to approximately 2000 very, very active Wikipedians who've worked night and day to pull together the vast majority of the 1.4M articles we enjoy every day. They do it without pay, and they would probably find the idea of getting paid for their work kind of repugnant. These folks are wonderful, remarkable, and they create terrific content. We are the grateful recipients of their terrific work.

There's only two problems with this group: (1) There aren't enough of them. Missionaries have always been a distinct minority, and their work, while terrific, tends to be limited by the small numbers in their ranks. (2) They can only work on things they believe in. Writing textbooks for children in 3rd-world countries? Sure! Helping you figure out which vacation package is better? Don't count on it.

2. Recreators. The recreators write, well, recreationally. In our opinion, these folks constitute the majority of the writers creating more than 12,000 new blogs per minute (and growing), or answering most of the 160M questions that have showed up in Yahoo Answers over the last year. They find value in community or sharing practical know-how, but more than anything they find writing and interacting with others fun, relaxing, stimulating, etc. Blogs, forums, Q&A sites, and hang-out sites like Helium and Gather are all outlets that they enjoy using for a couple of hours per day or week.

These folks create terrific amounts of content on just about every subject, and it's fun to browse through their stuff. But there's a problem with this group, too. Their content creation is almost entirely untethered from any quantifiable demand. It's almost all push, no pull. It's more about their creative outlet than your need for information. This means that while it's likely that there are folks writing about the topic you're interested in on the web, it's not necessarily likely that they're addressing your particular questions.

The web's content has become so "push" oriented that we all find ourselves combing through information that wasn't designed for us--or for anyone else, really . . . it's usually created to give the author a creative, recreational outlet most of the time--trying to find the bits and pieces we really want and need. This is now the norm.

3. The Capitalists. These are folks that want our money. And, as usual, they'll provide a better product for it, too. Why? Because in free markets, they have to compete against other folks who want our money too, and that competition is always a good thing for the consumer. Interestingly, the web hasn't catered well to date to information capitalists. They have to use eBay or kludgy PDF or eBook downloads to sell their stuff.

Yepic has been designed to give the capitalists a place to create and hawk their digital wares in an open market.