Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The discovery revolution

In his now-famous book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson describes how the web is transforming mass markets into millions of niche markets, observing that the "tail of available variety is far longer than we realise" and that "all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market".

Companies have begun chasing those niche markets. Consumers have found themselves inundated with an unprecedented amount of choice, in music, video, movies, information and products that span a huge range of interests. Add to that the explosive growth of user-generated content (from blogs to You Tube and Flickr) and you begin to see the problem facing users today: finding a way to navigate this vast landscape of choice.


By using the power of collective intelligence, that is by getting millions of consumers to share their tastes and recommendations, companies going after the niche markets in the long tail are providing ways to ease that navigational problem.


The idea of web discovery is not new. Yahoo began as a portal with pre-selected links to help users find interesting websites by topic. The web outgrew these editorial "best of" lists and instead the best lists became based on the wisdom of the crowd.

As Mr Anderson puts it, "millions of regular people are the new tastemakers...These new tastemakers aren't a super-elite of people cooler than us: They are us."


More importantly, Mr Anderson says that "for the first time in history, we're able to measure the consumption patterns, inclinations and tastes of an entire market of consumers in real time, and just as quickly adjust the market to reflect them".

This notion of crowd-sourcing is at the heart of web discovery.
With the enormous amount of data and processing power residing on the web today, the discovery process is largely automated. Launched as a browser toolbar, StumbleUpon lets users give thumbs up or down ratings while the tool profiles their tastes. This profile data feeds into a set of algorithms that decide which sites to display next.

Discovery is burgeoning. Music in a way is all about discovery. Apple's iTunes app Genius recommends new music based on your past purchases. But my favourite music discovery service is MOG, an online community that combines social networking with music, where you can "discover people through music and music through people". You can download an app that can in turn upload the basics of music collection so that MOG can automatically make recommendations. Next thing you know, you'll be inviting your friends to use the service, link to your MOG page and further enhance your music discovery experience.


Another website that provides an innovative approach to entertainment and discovery is Funny or Die, where users get to vote on whether a video is funny. If it is, it stays. If it's not then it's relegated to the "crypt". In a way, Funny or Die represents an attempt to provide some structure for the disjointed content found on sites like YouTube.


I believe that web discovery is an important business lever for many companies. A sure-fire way to increase revenue is to surprise and delight customers and a fantastic way to do that is to deliver recommendations quickly and with minimal input, gathering preferences that in turn allow a progressively better discovery experience.