Color me disappointed.

I think that maybe the ‘new companies’ of Flickr, Delicious et al will meet a crunch point where the people-in-charge-of-the-cash-flow will demand that the eyeballs are monetised - and I’m just not convinced that the audiences of the social software sites will play ball. One problem is that - as the owner of ‘the space in which communities exist’ - your space is replicable by a thousand different companies. What is Flickr’s differentiator? The number of users or the relevance and portability of the Flickr brand? Well, I think it’s currently 50/50. But what happens when Flickr start charging everyone a rental fee of their ‘virtual space’? I think they’ll lose more than the 50% audience that business wisdom tells them they’ll lose.

Historically, landlords have profited because real estate is at a premium. When real estate is valued by traffic rather than location and quantified by gigs per month rather than pounds per acre, the power shifts more (tho’ not entirely, of course) toward the tenant. In the case of Flickr/YouTube/MySpace, I’m just not sure that the brand they’ve created by weight of numbers can survive when those numbers are able to relocate so easily and painlessly.

The cost of re-location in these examples is minimal - in many ways, I agree with your original article - all a YouTubeMeToo site has to do is cope with (a) re-coding of submitted videos and (b) an audience that provokes extreme peaks of traffic. These aren’t simple problems, but they’re certainly not insurmountable. The cost of entry is relatively low. That smells of a market where the first-mover advantage is slight at best.

On the other hand, the potential of these first-mover sites is real: my advice to Flickr et al would be to establish a relationship with a single existing brand which has some resonance with the existing (intended?) user group: at the moment, the aspirational value of the “YouTubeMeToo” companies is hugely limited: it shines during the exclusive “Invite a (maximum of 6) friends” stage, but as soon as everyone has the previously-coveted memb ership, the novelty quickly wanes. Marry Flickr to (say) Lomo and you have a whole different proposition - where membership = an expression of a ‘unique and inneresting” personality.

Of course, the choice of the brand relationship is difficult and fuzzy - but that’s where our favourite brand strategist make his big bucks…

I think you bring up an interesting question - does it make a difference to position yourself as part of the overall community or that you’re the owner of the community. Surely, online gaming doesn’t have this kind of problem? They can’t be the only ones on the planet.

I do think that the relationship changes when you ask for money and the silly thing to do is start a community without asking for it, pushing a free-for-all and we-love-everyone-equally story, to suddenly create hierarchy and walls to do so.

Do you see the possible future where (specifically in their case:) Flickr and delicious (… put them in yourself) actually just become Yahoo! and therefore putting an end to their overtly pronoun-led positioning? Lending a little to your concept that it’s hard to encourage monetizing such a friendly, first-person relationship, and recruit more eyeballs?

Thanks for commenting.

I assume that the good people of YouTube are looking - doe-eyed and coy - at the VPs of the various traditional media groups (what *are* Havas buying nowadays?), busily looking up synonyms for ‘eyeballs’ to use in their pre-sale approach docs.

It’s an oddity of the web that (often) the companies that create the communities online are the least able to monetise them. I wonder if this is due - in part at least - to the fact that so many of these online community sponsor companies (Flickr, FriendsReunited and so on) present themselves as being *a part of* the community rather than the *owners of* the space in which the community exists; their attempts to monetise the community is then seen in the same light as the party host who suddenly starts charging their guests for the wine and cheese they’d previously enjoyed for free. There’d be an interesting academic survey on the use of the personal pronoun in web community sites - I wonder if YouTube, Flickr and delicious are going to regret writing in the friendly, chummy (and ultimately un-saleable) first-person.

* Life is too short to write de.li.ci.ou.s.or.wha.tev.ersi.lly.pun.ctua.t.ion they want me to use…

1m a month is outrageous - and surely adds up to more than the 11m in funding they’ve raised and any extra for special promotions or advertising.

I came across this blog post by Jason Calacanis.