MediaVidea

The Attention Economy is an A-listers' Economy

That's the hard truth behind all that hype around web 2.0.

Case in point: Findory, a service that enabled personalization and recommendations of information. Think of Findory as your personal Digg or Techmeme.

The Web 2.0 slowdown is for real. Findory is folding up.

The main reason for Findory's demise:
Lack of advertising support. People won't pay for personal aggregator/recommender software and the market for web sites that are just collections of links is a tough one, ruled by the likes of Digg and to a lesser extent, Techmeme.

Findory made it easy for easy to create personal memetrackers/aggregators but where is the advertising? Besides, unless you are covering a micro-niche, people find it better to go to the big aggregators such as Techmeme.

Now, let's come to the A-lister part of the argument:
Techmeme is also successful because it covers mainly the A-list web sites and blogs. Gabe Reviera reportedly started with manually entering 1000 chosen web sites into the Techmeme search engine. Readers know that on any given day, they can access the TOP stories from the TOP sources.

Techmeme has followed the successful example of Celebrity magazines. In the process, It has become a celebrity destination itself. When one of this writer's stories gets mentioned on Techmeme, that is a big high, for sure.

Digg is successful because it has a big user base and many submit stories to justify their egos - how many rate; how many visits; how are the comments? Etc.

Digg does not benefit the site owner directly because most Diggers don't click on ads, but a history of consistent digging gets you a loyal readership that might come to your site directly. Digg succeeds because of its social function, however skewed it may be.

If there was a bunch of great niches that users developed using Findory and shared these niche sites/.pages, then Findory might have had a better chance.

Creating an A-list property is a must for commercial success in the Attention Economy. What do you think?

posted by Pramit Singh @ 10:53 AM