Content (including product and service) + Audience (the people using the Content) + Monetization (generating revenue from the Audience) is the full media business. Need all 3 parts.

I was digging everything until “Content: Content is your product, your service, your iPhone app, your web site, your blog, etc.[ ...]” but then “Content is where most entrepreneurs spend 90% of their time, but it is only 1/3 of their business.” Um, so if it’s every part of my business but only 1/3rd of it – I mean, what the heck does that paragraph even say? It seems like it was written by a drunk guy. If it’s 99% of my business, I’m gonna have to spend a lot more than 33% of my time on it.

And “Building Audiences”? Yeah, back in the late ’90′s and early 2000′s companies would buy other ones just because they had a lot of people, with their info, signed up to a service. But guess what? I can’t think of a company, other than Google, and now its imitators, who found a way to monetize that huge amount of personal info. And Google, et. al. didn’t buy it, they built it, and Gmail has *no* content at all. It offers a service. So if you look at who’s making money by “building audiences”, you’ll find they almost always offer service, not content. Newspapers are dying in print, but also online. advice above: FAIL.

Advice about “paid upgrade” as a way to monetize the “built audience” is also a FAIL – I restarted two startups with that model – give away the basic service for free or cheap, then offer the “real stuff” for a higher price. Conversion rate to a higher, more expensive service was about 5%. Didn’t even pay for all the work to add the extra services.

Having now read two articles with advice given from people who tried to build startups, and – key point here – failed – I think it might be a good idea to try to get some stuff from the companies that are doing well. How about blog posts from people from Tripwire or Jive about how to succeed, not “what I learned when I failed.”? Or is that too obvious?

@J. Pablo – no, Twitter is one-to-many, physically and mathematically. One person, program, etc. creates a useless 140 character or less msg whch is usully wrtten in txtspk – which only makes it worse, then sent to many, many receivers. If they forward it on, they’re just repeating the one-to-many reality. Many to many is, at best, say, a collection of comments like these, written by many, then read by many. But no immediate tech (IM, txt msgs, Twitter) is anything but (1) one-to-many and (2) almost always a waste of time.

Regarding “Platform”, I think it falls under the Content category. A platform is strategy for getting other folks (developers) to build content for your Audience. It’s not too unlike a UGC strategy, from that standpoint. There are lots of different content creation strategies, and a platform approach is one of them.

Thanks!

Ray, building a HIGH-QUALITY audience is critical early on, I very much agree!

Marshall, would love to participate.

Tom, very well said. Audience is hard because it has to be earned the old fashion way: one happy user at a time. No way to game it or fast-track a high-quality audience.

-Mike