Content acquisition strategies

Content acquisition strategies:

1. Aggregation (retrevo) - can be a good starting point but not an attractive destination. Scambait.

2. Skilled Labor (cnet) - easy to get started and usually highest objective quality but doesn’t scale.

3. Unskilled Labor (Turk) - easy to get started and scales some but hard to provide anything meaningful beyond simple classification. Techniques to get more discerning info push cost to unattractive levels.

4. Machine Generation - hard to start, hard to produce meaningful and flexible results. Generally poor human consumable results.

5. Crowdsourced (pinterest, Wikipedia) - impossible to get going, hard to maintain, easy to break. Fantastic subjective quality. Magical if achieved.

6. Vanity (Facebook, dribbble) - hard to get going, subject is generally fixed, hard to monetize due to ownership of content, privacy concerns.

These lines are not fixed. Google successfully combines many of these categories. Most top500 websites use more than one.

Thoughts?

“E-commerce retailers should also take notice of the results in the study, as Amazon won’t be the only beneficiary of showrooming. By understanding where your customers shop offline, you identify opportunities to acquire new customers, and convert more offline spend online”

David Shim, Founder and CEO of Placed 

Lark update video

I’ve put up a quick walkthrough of the functionality we’ve built over the last couple of weeks. I plan on updating this as we make more progress, love to hear your thoughts!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9-74W3SBzc

Lark’s YC Summer 2013 application is in! Wish us luck :)

Reviews as a driver of change

While I’m in Beijing I have been using travel advisors Beijing guide. It’s essentially a downloadable dump of their reviews for Beijing (good idea for lark long term btw).

It’s interesting because if I ask a guide or a hotel or a taxi where the best place to get Peking duck or a massage I get pointed to the restaurant or brothel/masseuse that is paying them.

However just looking in the tripadvisor app I can see that the democratized voting by review system that they have created is surfacing restaurants that are very different than the ones I’m being recommended by locals. As it turns out they are fantastic (and frequently cheaper).

So in this way tripadvisor disrupts the kickback system and nepotism that always evolves in these tourist destinations (just like Las Vegas).

I think there is a similar opportunity in the product review space. It seems to me that in order to make this happen you need a few things:

1) A system of trust that increases the barrier to faking reviews - reputation + voting
2) Strong social/psychological incentive to write reviews - traffic + reputation
3) The ability for users/businesses to add products

I could include things like objective surfacing and review quantity but I think those fall largely without the parameters of 1 & 2.

Tripadvisor has all of these in the travel space. This doesn’t exist in the consumer product apace.

What would democratized product reviews look like? Would products from up and comers in interesting product verticals do better against established brands if their product was better? Would products that typically would not even be found online receive interest because the manufacturer themselves can list the product independent of distribution?

I’m not sure but I really want to find out. I don’t think it can be anything but powerful.

Today we got search working, and there’s a simple register/login mechanism!