Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!

This article questions the business model of the new social networking services (& echoes my suspicion that these things are still at an experimental stage, where every possible idea & permutation is tried out on the market until one of them gels – & becomes the killer app which, in retrospect, was perfectly obvious).

Twitter comes in for the greatest skepticism because it is relatively difficult to moneterise. However, perhaps this is because we are still thinking in outdated categories.There is only one thing worse this, & that is trying to suppress new ways of doing thing because they threaten your cosy monopoly.

The perfect example of  the latter –  ‘Canute-think’ –  is the expensive & utterly futile attempts of the film & recording industries to stamp out file-sharing. The death throes of the outdated business model that file-sharing threatens has brought about such absurdities  as:

• Prosecuting 8-year old kids for thousands of dollars
• Wasting a fortune on DRM systems that proved so ineffective & obstructive that they were almost immediately abandoned
• Trying to force service providers to (illegally) act as judge, jury & executioner
• &c. &c.

It was difficult for the old mindset to see the way forward. However, the mist is now beginning to clear a little. Bands are learning to play again (or, at least, learning how to mime convincingly) & making money out of live performance & merchandise. They are also bypassing record companies through websites that deal direct with the customers. Finally, there are new services such as Spotify.

Register with Spotify & you get to select tracks from a huge online selection, add them to playlists & listen to them via streaming. You pay either 99p a day, £9.99 a month – or nothing at all (& get a short advert every 20 minutes). It’s a custom radio station for people who can’t be bothered to hack file-sharing.

Of course, this is very bad news for radio stations with the enormous overheads that go with their need for a national network of radio transmitters. Yes, most traditional radio stations are now establishing themselves online, & offering streaming audio versions, However, in doing so, they abandon their greatest strength – their domination of that  communications channel – broadcasting makes way for narrowcasting, a world in which they are not prepared to compete.

Back to Twitter… I follow the odd webcomic (& most of them are very odd indeed). A fictional character from one of these (Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer, from Girl Genius) has a Twitter account.  I am following him now. Doing this significantly increases the visibility of the webcomic, drawing it to my attention at regular intervals. It’s good advertising/promotion. Worth a small payment to Twitter, perhaps?

Incidentally, the authors of the  webcomic that Othar features in made the counter-intuitive discovery that, if they posted their material on the web for free, this massively increased sales of the paper books – & opened up a new market for merchandise. Similarly, novelists (e.g. Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow) are boosting their ‘dead tree’ sales by making online versions available for free download.

I’m not suggesting that webcomics are Twitter’s financial salvation. I’m pointing out that the web is, even now, breaking down the business models that enabled large corporations to effectively own multimedia content. They are being replaced with… a number of new ideas that are going to make people a lot of money.

Services like Twitter have had a lot of money put into them with no idea of how investors are going to get it back. They represent a high-stakes gamble. Back in the days when the idea that anyone would buy books online was seriously doubtful, Amazon squandered millions on a similar gamble. If people were prepared to buy online, they would dominate a massive future market. If not, they would lose their shirts.

Amazon scored. Big time. While Amazon knew exactly where their income was coming from (people paying for thier books).  Twitter doesn’t.  It is a mark of much higher the stakes are now, that they are prepared to blow millions in the hope that ‘something will come up’ before they run out of money.