Another prediction for 2006 – twelve months from now, web culture will be significantly less idealistic and communitarian. Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part, since I’m not feeling particularly idealistic and communitarian these years, but I see three trends developing that take us in this direction:
Increasing numbers of individuals will notice that many of the new business models are entirely dependent on their personal production, aggregated and wrapped. They will begin to ask ‘what’s in it for me?’ in a very public fashion, and woe to the company that can’t provide a good answer. Combine this with the recent ire over the old problem of automated blog theft – see Jason Calacanis, Om Malik, and Shelley Powers for examples – and you inevitably end up with stricter controls on sharing and the belief that good fences make for good neighbours.
Too many start-ups without plans for revenue (or simply planning to be ad-supported) are going to fail to get VC funding. Start-ups with VC funding are going to come under heavy pressure to get more revenue as it becomes clearer to all that only a small proportion of them are ever going to get acquired and the IPO market remains hostile to non-profitable companies. The result – an increased emphasis on revenue generation, and the placement of advertising everywhere advertisers are willing to test. Non-monetized communities will become increasingly harder to find.
Finally, individual bloggers will increasingly reap the rewards of a good blog – I owe my current job to my noodling around on this website – but will also increasingly be affected by blogging mishaps that can’t be deleted after the fact. As more information about the pleasures and perils of a public blog become commonly known, bloggers will adapt, self-promoting carefully through self-censorship and carefully-managed identities. This trend will increase as some of the more outspoken and prone-to-conflict bloggers find more opportunities closed than open to them, and complain about it publicly. They’ll get a lot of public support, but their primary role will be as warnings to the rest of us.
The end result: a web with a different feel, and much angst over what’s been lost, but just as many (if not more) opportunities to earn a living or start a business.
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Did you write this to warn me?
Ha! Maybe I wrote it as a warning to *me*…
Is this a prediction or just a curmudgeonly eisegesis?
John – ask me in a year when I can judge how accurate I was…
Seems like we are repeating the ’99-’02 drill all over again. As usual, a good number of the VC firms are just followers (lets do what the other firm is doing). They seem to be funding companies that seem to have only early adopter traffic and believe this traffic is worth a good chunk of $ to the larger firms. The larger firms (aka Yahoo, Google) are going to realize the acquisition price was much higher than building it in-house. Of course the acquired brand bring its identity, followers and community along with it but I believe the long term value of these entities is low (considering the early adopter traffic is open to trying new web properties out there thus making switching costs almost negligible). At the end, the VCs are back to realizing its all about the real market value (I am sure a significant number of the recently web 2.0 funded companies are banking their market size on hyped up analyst projections), team, and operational capabilities of the firm.
It’s a good thing I’m semi-retired as my blog is probably ticking off everyone.
And comment/linkback toadyism will rise in lockstep with, if not outpace, self-censorship.
Two sides of the same coin.
In that sense, the web will be a much kinder, albeit artificial, place.
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