When people talk about the future of media with bold predictions about how technology will affect it, they often underestimate the importance of content and its effects on how people interact with it. The two major topics of debate in new media is commenting on news articles and aggregation of content.

Most media companies focus on whether or not requiring users to use real names, with a service such as facebook comments increases the quality of discussions. But just as important as the quality of the comments is whether or not your content is discussion worthy.

I also want to talk briefly about new media companies such as buzzfeed, which I wrote about previously and Business Insider that specialize in aggregating and curating content, as opposed to a more traditional editorial approach. But first let me talk about commenting.

When companies enable facebook comments in the hope that the discussion quality will increase or more commonly, that facebook would be a “safe” way to embrace comments they are often disappointed. Its not unusual to find a site with facebook comments enabled and no comments. This is not cultural, I’ve seen it happen in both Japan and the west.

The alternative to facebook comments are anonymous commenting systems, systems that don’t use real names. In Japan with paranoia around around 2ch like discussions, many Japanese media companies are extremely worried about this approach.

My company Land Rush Group built a sudo anonymous with sankei called re:mark, the system allows users to comment using their facebook or twitter account, but also has an “alias” feature so while their account is associated with a real social identity, they aren’t required to disclose their name in public forums.

In America the New York Times uses an anonymous system that only requires email registration. There is also the major technology blog, Techcrunch that started with a semi anonymous commenting system like re:mark and then switched to facebook comments in an effort to combat trolls writing negative or abusive comments. After nearly three years or so using facebook comments they switched back to a semi anonymous system because, well, the trolls made the comment discussions more interesting.

While the discussion at techcrunch with facebook comments enabled was more intelligent it wasn’t as entertaining and the number of people commenting decreased dramatically. The end result was that users stopped coming back to articles to read the comments.

For a website an active commenting section can increase pageviews when commenters or those following the discussion come back to that page multiple times throughout the day to track the progress of discussions. Another hard reality is that anonymous or semi anonymous commenters are often the ones to provide insights that can’t be found within real name commenting systems.

Techcrunch articles about potential fraud at technology companies often had anonymous comments from employees and former employees with inside information, while there is the potential that those comments could be pure lies, a high number of related accusations, anonymous or not, definitely gives insight into a company that just can’t be done in traditional reporting.

The much ignored truth, facebook comments, semi anonymous comments or anonymous comments matter little if the content is not discussion worthy. The content most likely to be comment worthy is the same content that some media companies are nervous about having comments on.

If you take for example the New York times op-ed on the Senkaku ownership which had more than 140 comments on it. The New York Times doesn’t require real names, and while the majority of the comments were anonymous some commenters used their real names including one Hong Kong resident who responded to more than 20 comments in defense of China. Another article on The New York Times about the tragic shooting in connecticut had more than 2000 comments. The matter of debate within those 2000 comments wasn’t about the shooting itself but about gun control in America.

Both articles were highly controversial. What drove intelligent discussion was the content, not the commenting system. Controversial content will generate controversial comments, if a publisher enables facebook comments simply because they don’t want to risk controversial comments they are missing the point completely. Its not the commenting system its the content.

Controversial content, drives controversial discussions which drives pageviews which drives advertising revenue. That’s the simple recipe.

Which brings me to content aggregators. Sites like buzzfeed, Business Insider and originally Huffington Post were driven in large part by content created by other media companies and individuals. Effectively what they are good at is identifying the most controversial and trending topics, embracing its controversy with more glaring headlines and stances.

So we wonder why new media companies have a advantage over traditional media companies when it comes to the internet? Its because they embrace the controversy because they live and die by impressions, not print subscriptions, not paper advertisements, controversy and impressions.

The best aggregators are taking a larger story, summarizing it in half the space used by the original source and encouraging discussion around it, in my opinion this proves that the discussions are equally as important as the content itself and that a successful news site requires both.

If a publisher is building great content without discussion they will eventually lose their audience to those that do have the discussions whether those discussions are social or anonymous, but obviously the lower the barrier to joining the discussion the better off the company will be in the long term.

It took techcrunch three years to realize this but now they have once again opened the gates of discussion to the trolls of the internet, hopefully they will be more behaved this time.

This is a paper I worked on with members of Korea University security research center. It’s probably one of the last serious security research projects I will work on unfortunately. The paper was recently published in Computer Communications, which you have to pay to access.

If you feel like reading technical security documentation, there is a older version available on Korea Universities website, http://ccs.korea.ac.kr/pds/VoIP_SEC08.pdf

This is the unedited english version of the latest Sankei column, posted by request. Original is here: http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/130114/bsj1301140502000-n1.htm

If you want to know about new digital media, you don’t go to silicon valley, you go to silicon alley. New York City is where all recently major digital media businesses have been born. My home town. Its also the home to BuzzFeed, a well funded, if controversial new media company. Today buzzfeed has a valuation of 200M USD on 20M USD a year in revenue. The company doesn’t want to sell for anything less than 300M USD and investors believe this will soon become a billion dollar media operation.

Buzzfeed.com organizes and creates viral content. When you go to the website you can track popular content trending across the web. Content that is generating “buzz.” The company has a team of 130 employees and recently closed an investment round, raising an additional $20M to fund growth. Total money raised today is 43M but nearly all of the money raised in their previous round is still in the bank, unspent.

While timely, much of the content you find on buzzfeed isn’t by any means traditional news content. For example, one article featured on the website titled “How A Blind Man Takes Beautiful Photos With Instagram” contained one youtube video, two paragraphs and six pictures grabbed from instagram. Despite the fact that its a content company lacking what is considered “traditional content” the company is one of the leading destination sites on the western web.

A recent article titled “21 photos that will restore your faith in humanity” garnered more than 10 million views and 2M likes on facebook. Making it one of the most viewed articles on the site for the month. Given that the site averages 40M unique users a month, the article which only contained photos with descriptions had a significant impact on traffic and raised a lot of questions about this new form of media.

The management of the company comes from a significant pedigree. The founder of the company Jonah Peretti was also the co-founder of huffington post and much of the engineering and analytics team are former Huffington Post engineers. So this is an experienced team of online content creators and promoters and it shows. While behind in revenue, the site already has more traffic than Huffington Post had when it was sold for $315M USD or Bleacher Report, a similar new media site dedicated to sports that was sold for $200M.

The reason that Buzzfeed is behind these other media companies in revenue is because Buzzfeed has a non-traditional business model for online media companies. They don’t sell banner advertisements. Only sponsored content. They specialize in creating paid content that is optimized to go viral. While its not guaranteed that content will always go viral, a hit that reaches 10M unique users is significantly less expensive than paying per impression on a traditional media site.

In addition to the challenges the company will have growing revenue to become that billion dollar company the site isn’t without its controversy. The content and site is optimized to make it easy for content to go viral on the web with a focus on what is likely to do well on facebook and twitter. But much of their content is compiled from what is already trending on other sites like facebook and twitter.

For example, the article that gained 10M UU users and much of the content compiled on the site not only wasn’t created by buzzfeed, but the concept of compiling those images together into a meme wasn’t even originally thought of by buzzfeed.

Two articles previously posted online on NedHardy.com, another popular meme website one titled “7 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity” followed by “13 pictures to help restore your faith in humanity” had already garnered significant traffic. Half the photos used on buzzfeeds “21 pictures” post were taken directly from the NedHardy.com site and the remainder were taken from the popular Reddit community (similar to 2ch). And while the articles links to the original photo source, it doesn’t mention the creators of the meme.

What buzzfeed does well is they track trends generated on other social media websites, then they repackage those memes or trending content under a new title, and publish the content via their website. The content is almost guaranteed to become viral because, it already is viral.

Its the cheapest form of content ever and if they were selling banners, they would be earning a significant amount of money. I think if they do decide to enable banners, revenues are likely to increase. Right now what they are offering more than anything is their talent for identifying viral trends and matching that to a brand looking to piggyback on top of that trend to generate sales or leads.

A recent sponsored post on the website featured animated gifs similar to what you might find on 2ch of actor Jason Statham fighting in different movies. The post is titled “10 Ways Jason Statham Could Kick Your Ass“ and included animated gifs of the actor hitting people with chairs and throwing knives at bad guys. Its actually a promotion for a new action movie starring Jason Statham, called Parker.

More than anything Buzzfeed and many other new media companies focus less on deciding what readers will want to read than aggregating and curating things that have already become popular. Of course, traditional media companies are likely to avoid this, but the problem is that this type of viral, non serious content is what is capturing much of the referral traffic from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Some might argue that its a sign of terrible things to come, old media was about in depth and investigated content, and new media is about…cute kittens. Its a depressing thought, but I think its more than that. Paper is a limiting form, and to capture readers imagination you must be a wordsmith, but with new media the forms of communication are much more diverse. Its now possible to have 21 pictures capture our hope for humanity and the fears of society in much the way Tolstoy captures the essence of his generation with tomes.

Media that becomes popular says something about our society as a whole. Instead of arguing that companies like Buzzfeed are degrading journalism, we need to try to better understand why 2M people felt the need to share with friends the fact that they liked those 21 images of humanity. In the end we are left with more questions than answers. And kittens.

UPDATE: 

I received a lot of comments on hackernews and twitter. Some of them asked “if anger is so important why is there not as much innovation coming out of Greece or Nigeria or Ethopia” which misses the point. 1) Solving a problem and scaling the solution across America is a huge market opportunity and is also very difficult. America is the 3rd largest country in the world by land mass. Its larger than China. 2) While I don’t know about innovation in every country in the world, I think its presumptuous to assume no innovation is coming from other countries. But the scale is vastly different. With the exception of Africa as a continent. If a innovation can be developed in one African country it often scales to other similar countries in the continent. The largest mobile payment provide in the world? From Africa.

America has horrible infrastructure. The railway infrastructure in the
USA was built primarily for the transport of oil (freight) and hasn’t
evolved much since then. There is one railroad company in America
built for the transportation of passengers, Amtrak. Amtrak is short
for American Track, which is funny because it only covers half of
America. HalfTrack might be a better name.

The majority of the tracks Amtrack runs on are owned by freight
companies and Amtrak is beholden to the freight companies in many
ways. For example, if Amtrak is late and misses its scheduled time on a
freight rail line, the freight company can and often does force the
Amtrak passenger trains to follower the slower freight trains. The
average freight train runs between 10 mph to 79 mph while Amtrak has a
top speed of 150mph. While 150mph is nothing compared to other
national rail systems, the effective speed of an Amtrak train is
actually about 79mph. Either because they are running on those rented
rails from freight lines who have no motivation to upgrade the
infrastructure to support faster trains or because they are rolling
along at 20mph behind a train full oats. God bless America.

In the late 1960′s the US postal system was a unreliable and slow
machine. It hasn’t improved much since then. Today I can fly from NY
to San Francisco in 6 hours but if I send a 1oz letter the same route
it will take one week. Smart people at big national firms in the late
60′s figured this was lunacy and instead placed company employees on
planes to take interoffice mail between offices.

Putting people on airplanes was exactly how DHL got its start. Flying
interoffice mail for companies between San Francisco and Honolulu.
This mail transportation system was actually highly illegal and the US
Government went through a lot to try and shut DHL down.

The founder of DHL, a guy named Larry Hillblom was a lawyer and had
obvious physical abnormalities (and might have been a pedophile).
After winning his battle against the US Government, he re-wrote the
laws of a small nation as a way of saying F-U to the US Government, then
sued the US at the United Nations. I think its fair to say he was a
little crazy. After all, who would challenge the United States Postel
service then follow it up with suing the US in front of the UN after
changing the constitution of a small nation state? I think he might
have been a little angry too.

Spending so much time in Japan makes me really wonder why so much
innovation comes out of the USA. And I think its simply because so
many services in the US suck. People get angry, build a solution and
because of the simple fact that America is HUGE solving a common
problem in America often requires the infrastructure of a small
international company.

Amazon.com wants to ship books across the United States? Are they
going to trust the US Postal Service? Perhaps our amazing rail and
freight system? Its an incredibly complex operation for Amazon.com to
be able to ship a book to you within 3 days anywhere in the United
States. Because US infrastructure is so crappy. But they managed to do
it.

Then Amazon.com expands to a country like Japan, where it takes one
day to ship anything from one part of the country to another and they
reduce this shipping to 12 hours. And suddenly they look like shipping
geniuses. After going through the school of hard-knocks in the USA,
its much easier to go abroad.

Airbnb exist because the hotel industry in the USA doesn’t add a
tremendous amount of value outside of providing a safe place to sleep,
unless you are paying more than $500 a night. The entire Airbnb
operation seems to be violating a ton of laws in the process. Despite
that, they figured it out in the USA. Going abroad is easy after that.
Airbnb could never have started as a business in Japan. No tenant
would risk: 1) letting someone into their home 2) no one would risk
violating their lease agreements and 3) apartments are tiny. But its
been able to expand to Japan. It just would have never built momentum
if it started in Japan. Not enough angry people willing to ignore a
half dozens laws to make a buck.

Uber exist because the taxi system in San Francisco is horrible. You
make an appointment for a taxi to show up at 6:30 and they show up at
7:00, if they show up at all. Uber was built out of anger. Its
compelling in a city like San Francisco where the taxi service is
horrible, not as compelling in NYC where their are too many taxis most
days. Despite that, I still used it in NYC. And of course, Uber is
violating a few laws in the process.

Many great innovations in the USA come out of anger and frustration
and a attitude that makes Americans believe they can change the system.
When implemented across a huge country like the United States, Airbnb,
Uber, DHL have to deal with laws and regulations in every single state
in the country. In states the size of small countries. What better
training ground could their be for building a international company?

You have to be angry to break the law in order to build a better way.
That anger and willingness to challenge authority is missing from many
startups, but it exist in all the innovative ones.

This has been a interesting trip to the USA. The groundbreaking
innovation is here in America. Without a doubt. I consistently meet
super smart people and some of the hardest working people ever.

Of course there are those silly startups getting funding in SF but
when I meet visionaries, for lack of a better word, it is truly
inspirational.

The types of conversations I have in the USA with business owners
rarely happen in Japan. Conversations about disrupting major
industries and sectors, about fundamentally changing the way people
interact with the world around them. Groundbreaking! Exciting!

Startups should be more like professional fighters, get paid for
kicking the crap out of old industries.

Competitive fighting requires serious preparation and focus, the fun
part is not fighting, the fun part is winning. Entrepreneurs that
don’t innovate only love the idea of being a fighter, maybe they even
like fighting, but they will never fight anyone bigger than them and
they walk away after getting hit hard. Innovative entrepreneurs love
the idea of winning and while they select their battles, the bigger
the better. They train hard and fight hard. They get back up after
getting knocked down.

I’m not having these conversations in Japan. Is it because Japan isn’t
a confrontational society?

There is nothing more exciting than hearing from a startup that gets
the adrenaline pumping. Only happens to me in America.

Startups should aim to kick the crap out of something. Hard.

Here is a great idea for a scam. Create a hosting company and sell "lifetime" accounts that aren't really lifetime accounts, they are just accounts that work until you decide you don't want them to work anymore. Then try to sell the "lifetime" customers (hahaha) a new monthly account!

Is this how you want your company to be remembered?

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Joyent Support
Date: Friday, August 17, 2012
Subject: Legacy Service End of Life – Action Required

Action Required: Legacy Service End of Life Dear Ejovi Nuwere, We've been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud. For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we'd like to walk you through a few options. We understand this might be an inconvenience for you, but we have a plan and options to make this transition as easy as possible.  We’ve been developing more functionality on our new cloud infrastructure, the Joyent Cloud, for our customers who care about performance, resiliency and security.  Now’s the time to take advantage of all the new capabilities you don’t have today. Everyone that’s moved to our new cloud infrastructure has been pleased with the results.   We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012. However, we believe that you will enjoy the new functionalities of the Joyent Cloud. To show you our appreciation, as one of Joyent's lifetime Shared Hosting customers, we'd like to offer you a free 512MB SmartMachine on the Joyent Cloud for one year. Use this promotional code to redeem the offer. Promotional Code:    Please review the Terms and Conditions for the Joyent Cloud One Year Free 512 MB Machine Promotion by visiting this <a href="http://mkto-f0103.com/track?type=click&enid=bWFpbGluZ2lkPWpveWVudEJldGFjdXN0LTI3MzctNzMxNC0wLTExMTQtcHJvZC0yODczJm1lc3NhZ2VpZD0wJmRhdGFiYXNlaWQ9Mjg3MyZzZXJpYWw9MTI2NTIzMTM0NCZlbWFpbGlkPWVqb3ZpQGVqb3ZpLm5ldCZ1c2VyaWQ9MjM4ODY5LTEmZXh0cmE9JiYm&&&http://www.joyent.com/migration/migration-faq.php?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRokvK%…” target=”_blank”>link. To find out more about the Joyent Cloud and your options, please follow this <a href="http://mkto-f0103.com/track?type=click&enid=bWFpbGluZ2lkPWpveWVudEJldGFjdXN0LTI3MzctNzMxNC0wLTExMTQtcHJvZC0yODczJm1lc3NhZ2VpZD0wJmRhdGFiYXNlaWQ9Mjg3MyZzZXJpYWw9MTI2NTIzMTM0NCZlbWFpbGlkPWVqb3ZpQGVqb3ZpLm5ldCZ1c2VyaWQ9MjM4ODY5LTEmZXh0cmE9JiYm&&&http://www.joyent.com/migration?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRokvK%2FOZKXonjHpfsX66OQ…” target=”_blank”>link to our migration center for additional details. Sincerely, Jason Hoffman Founder and CTO Joyent jason@joyent.com Joyent, Inc. One Embarcadero Center, 9th Floor, San Francisco, Ca 94111. +1 415 400 0600 sales@joyent.com

If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please click on the following link: Unsubscribe

I think the worst thing an aspiring entrepreneur can do is read the
blog of another entrepreneur. Most business owners aren’t honest in
their public communications. They have customers, employees and
partners that read it. So all you end of getting is fluff and none of
the really painful stories that make entrepreneurs who they are.

You shouldn’t be reading blogs unless it’s directly related to the
work you are doing as part of building your business.

If I hear another “Seth Godin said…” or “techcrunch reported…” I’m
going to smack someone. Seth Godin is a smart guy but he doesn’t post
on his blog the recipe for building a successful business.

So where do you find the recipe? The fastest shortcut I’ve found is to
talk to other experienced entrepreneurs. Ideally someone with more
experience than you, if you are already running a business someone at
the same level is also OK. But nothing less.

That means, if you want to start a business, DO NOT go hang out with
someone else that wants to start a business too. It feels good to have
a aspiring brother at arms, but its a horrible idea, clueless +
clueless is still clueless.

Talking to real business owners face to face in a casual setting,
ideally in private, has taught me more than anything I’ve ever learned
about business from books and the “internets.”

Another thing that works well is to act really humble when you speak
with entrepreneurs. Arrogance is a common sign of a inexperienced
business owner, but arrogance also prevents people from opening up to
you.

We would all like to believe we are humble, but I try to purposely act
humble and this forces me to listen more instead of trying to argue
points.

One short cut I’ve found really works for me and I hope it works well
for you too, in a discussion try replacing the following:

“Yeah but…” with “…why do you think so?”
“I don’t agree…” with “…that’s interesting.”

Then I spend a few days thinking over all the points, sometimes I
still don’t agree, but sometimes I come around to seeing the other
persons perspective. Especially if I’ve spoken to other business
owners and the feedback has been similar.

The thing is, all this talking requires you to get off the internets
and stop reading blogs.

This is the unedited English version of my column published in Japanese by Sankei.

http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/120806/bsj1208060502001-n1.htm

app.net is a new platform that aims to replace twitter.com. It would
be safe to call it a twitter clone. The social network will have the
ability to post status updates and photos to friends and those
following you. The one major difference between app.net and any other
social network you have ever used is that app.net is a paid service.

Basic membership on the platform gives you twitter like functionality
and will costs $50 a year. But developers who want more access and
functionality on the platform have to pay $100 a year or $1000 a year,
depending on the amount of access and support they want.

app.net was launched by Dalton Caldwell, a serial entrepreneur who
started an online music company called Imeem that was acquired by
Myspace in 2003. Before changing the companies’ focus to app.net he
built a mobile photo sharing application called picplz.

Picplz pre-dated instagram and the lead investor in Dalton’s company
also invested in Instagram. Many people forget that Instagram started
as a check-in application similar to Foursquare, when Instragram
changed their business model to do photo sharing instead, Andreessen
Horowitz who previously invested in both refused to invest more money
into Instagram because of the conflict of interest between Picplz.
When Instagram was acquired for $1B dollars many questioned the
investment decision of Andreessen Horowitz.

Regardless, the end result is that Instragram won and Picplz lost, so
Dalton Caldwell decided to refocus his company on a new service. The
new concept that Dalton came up with was App.net, built to help
developers get their application noticed by users on facebook.
Dalton’s team developed technology to show users the apps that their
friends were using and recommend apps that they might be interested
in.

During the process of refocusing the company Dalton often discussed
his plans with the Facebook developer relationships team and parties
responsible for working with outside developers. Eventually the
Facebook team invited Dalton in to give a demonstration of his new
application.

But it turns out that it wasn’t just a demonstration Facebook wanted
from Dalton, they wanted his company. According to Dalton they planned
to release a service very similar to what Dalton was building and
planned to monetize it via advertising. This meant that Dalton’s
service wouldn’t have a chance to compete, so they offered to hire his
entire team and buy out his company.

This is a normal practice for Facebook, twitter and Google, if they
see an engineering team doing something interesting they will often
hire them just to get ahold of the talent. Oftentimes that means that
they will shutdown the product that the team was originally working on
and move those engineers towards focusing on similar internal
products.

But Dalton strongly resented this, he felt that Facebook was forcing
him to sell or be destroyed.

This is part of a much larger issue that developers creating facebook
and twitter applications are constantly dealing with.

When a company creates a application on top of Twitter and Facebook
they are basically building tower mansions (apartment buildings for
those outside of Japan) on land owned by someone else. There is no
guarantee how long developers will be able to use this land, nothing
stopping the owner from selling the land and more importantly, the
land owner, twitter or facebook could see how profitable your tower
mansion is and tell you to move the building, only to build a exact
copy in the same location.

While common, often times Twitter or Facebook simply ask to buy your
building and stay with the company after the acquisition, like
Instagram. Unfortunately all the companies similar to Instagram lose.
Like Picplz. And now it seemed it was happening to his new app.net
service before it even got started.

Developing on these platforms is a double edged sword. On one side you
gain access to a billion users but on the other side, your business is
totally dependant on another company with profit motivations.

Dalton’s concern is twitter and facebook don’t have the best interest
of users in mind, their main motivations in business is advertising
revenue and monetizing those users. Often times this need to monetize
users can destroy the businesses making money on top of their
platforms, if they think they can adapt those ideas for themselves.

Developers continue to develop on these platforms this but the
business relationship isn’t a comfortable one. This is the origin of
Dalton’s frustration, and I’m sure the threat of being put out of
business by Facebook was also part of his motivation to create a
social network free of the need to monetize users by conflicting with
the same developers responsible for growing its user base.

The new app.net aims to be a social network that instead of monetizing
users from advertising will make money from users paying a
subscription fee. Instead of forcing developers to change their
applications to support the companies advertising technology, they
will charge developers for access to the platform.

A few years ago while at Columbia Music we built a music platform for
artist to better connect with music fans. We felt that musicians
thought the existing music industry was broken, and benefited the
music label more than the artist and fan. We called it OtoRevo (sound
revolution in Japnaese) because we wanted to flip the equation; it was
a revolution of sorts.

The twitter and facebook platform is very similar to incumbents music
labels, but the problem with our revolution and the problem with
Dalton’s revolution is that music fans weren’t angry with music
labels, sure they weren’t pleased with everything labels did, but a
revolt requires a lot of anger from a significant portion of society
that just wasn’t there.

So while developers might be upset with the way twitter and facebook
goes about their business, and perhaps tech savvy consumers like you
and I might be a little uncomfortable with our social networks’
actions being used to sell our attention to advertisers, we aren’t
really angry, are we?

Dalton said if he can’t raise 500,000 from users and application
developers he won’t build this new revolutionary service. I think the
guy is crazy for trying and the lack of money he has raised, $200,000
with less than we week to go, I’m probably not alone in this thought.
I don’t think he will make it, but I will pay $50 anyway because I’m
crazy and sometimes we need to believe in the unbelievable.

And I’ll get a refund if he doesn’t reach $500K anyway, so what the heck.

“A study by Ernst & Young, an accounting firm, showed last year that
German, Italian and French entrepreneurs were far less confident about
their country as a place for start-ups than those in America, Canada
or Brazil. Very few French entrepreneurs said their country provided
the best environment; 60% of Brazilians, 42% of Japanese and 70% of
Canadians thought there was no place as good as home. Asked which
cities have the best chance of producing the next Microsoft or Google,
Ernst & Young’s businesspeople plumped for Shanghai, San Francisco and
Mumbai (though, to be fair, London got a look in too).”

http://www.economist.com/node/21559618

Twitmusic is one of the latest investments from 500 startups. What
might be the first technology company started in the Philippines to
receive major investment from a US investment fund.

The platform allows artist to upload music and promote it to twitter
users in a pretty innovative way. When a visiters go goes to the
website twitmusic.com it has a list of artist and their songs to
browse.

The website requires you to login via twitter to get any use out of
it, but once you go to a song page you can listen to the entire song
for free. If you click buttons like “#nowplaying” it sends a tweet in
the background telling your friends that you are listening to the song
with link to the page with the song. Or you could click “love” and it
sends a tweet saying you love the artist’s twitter account. Comments
on the song are, of course, also shared on your twitter account to
your friends.

Twitmusic is a viral growth engine for new and established artist.
It’s a single platform that automates many of the important components
needed to create social virality, ease of sharing, recommendations
from friends and trend seeding. For artist its a great platform and
after raising more than 500KUSD and moving the team the San Francisco,
they are ready to start doing more deals with major labels and artist.

Already Twitmusic has nearly 8,000 musicians with a combined 30M
twitter followers sharing a total 275K tracks. The site gets over 200K
unique pageviews a month and they are still growing.

The company has a lot of potential but it also brings into focus a
very interesting problem. Everyone from artist, businesses small and
large understand the value of social media marketing but there are
very few platforms that are easy to use and manage for those that are
non-technical.

Take for example the fact that plenty of artist promote their videos
on Youtube but very few can raise above the fold without detailed
study of how to game the Youtube platform. Millions of artist have
twitter and facebook accounts but fail to gain more than 500 followers
or likes, they never gain the elusive viral traction that everyone
talks about.

To explode in popularity requires a consistently executed strategy of
on-going marketing, some of it paid. For someone on a small budget the
trial and error period required to find out what works can quickly
burn through limited budgets.

For all brands (for the rest of this we will treat brands and artist
interchangeably) there is a basic level of archivable virality. When I
was at columbia music we found that a independant artist can gather
about 200-500 real people to support them with a action that required
creating a account and voting. A hurdle not as high as buying a CD or
song but still, a hurdle. The way that social media virality works, a
brand should be able to gain 10 new fans for every existing fan they
have. 500 fans should translate into 5000 followers and likes on
facebook and 5,000 customers should translate into 50,000 followers
and likes over say, a 6 months campaign fairly easily. This is a base
level of virality. But often times brands fail to reach it.

The reason so many brands fail to reach this level of virality is that
they brands have no control over the medium of virality. They have no
control over youtube, twitter or facebook. In reality they are only
users trying to gain access to other users. Unless they are spending
advertising dollars on the platform which is a very expensive way to
gain new fans, they are really just like any other user.

Compare this to a brand website. On the website they can track how
many users are coming to their page, what they are doing on the page,
what products, songs, or items they are most interested in, etc at a
very detailed level. With this information they can optimize, make
modifications to the website to encourage more activity. On a brand
website they have something very valuable to growth, data. With data
they take action to encourage growth. Without data everything is a
guess.

On facebook and twitter brands don’t have any of that information, if
it does exist, it’s limited to the biggest spenders on their platform.
Youtube does provide a little information, but even that is limited.
In the case of artist, almost all music hosting platforms on the net
fail to provide anything more the ability to upload and host songs and
allow visitors to play or buy them.

twitmusic represents what I think will be a increasing trend of meta
social networks. Social networks that sit one layer above the social
networks that control the social graph like facebook and twitter.
These meta social networks will make it easier for users to share
content across networks, monitor the performance of content shared
across those networks and optimize to improve performance. It will
give them access to data. Regardless of the destination network.

The reality is that when it comes to social media marketing most small
brands, and even large brands are lost and slightly overwhelmed.
twitmusic isn’t a social media marketing platform, it has the
opportunity to become a new destination site artist and brands. From
that website, with the help of twitmusic data and tools, artist will
have the ability to push users to the destinations they want to
increase growth.

Twitmusic is more than a marketing platform, and its not a social
network. Its a meta social network who’s purpose is to drive, measure
and optimize viral growth on the social networks below them. Today
twitmusic supports only twitter, but eventually they will support all
major social networking platforms, I know this not because the company
has told me, but because its what is obviously necessary. And they
won’t be alone in this trend because as these social platforms become
bigger the more they will focus on the biggest partners and brands.
The meta social networks will assist the rest.