RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

How will these “web 3.0” trends affect your business?

Posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 7:33 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, business or just smart people, there’s one podcast your music player should never be without: Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner. My dedication to the weekly podcast was rewarded last week with a talk by Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon of Zynga. In the talk, Pincus, a serial entrepreneur (he founded Tribe.net), discussed three elements of the emerging “web 3.0.” Despite whether these actually qualify as web 3.0, or whether that term has any more significance than “social media,” you’ll want to pay attention:

1. Apps: Anyone with an iPhone already knows it. But the appification of Facebook, Salesforce, Google and other web titans suggests there’s more to apps than handheld video games. In fact, Pincus believes (and he seems to have a knack for this web stuff) that the traditional web battlefields are wide open. Even search, he proposes, has no clear leader in the app space. So just because your business dominates the web doesn’t mean it will dominate web-connected apps.
2. Measurement: As a company focused on analytics and measurable results, we’re happy to hear about this—and we’ve noticed. As people increasingly turn to the web and apps for things they previously got elsewhere (like books and newspapers), the ability to measure their activity has become both more important and more possible. That’s why so many web analysts and marketers were excited by Google’s recent announcement of new mobile- and app-tracking features in Google Analytics. Such measurement enables rapid testing and optimization. And if your company’s not doing it, you will almost certainly get left behind by more savvy competitors.
3. Paid content: Could it really be? Are people finally willing to pay for web content? Well, yes and no. With over one billion downloads, the Apple app store reportedly makes $1 million a day in application sales. Traditional websites, however, still tend to fail at pay-wall experiments. So it appears that just because something uses data from the web doesn’t mean people treat it like a website. That’s of important note for your business, as it’s possible you can develop an app that people will actually pay for (like Kraft did). Why? I think there are a few reasons. First, people treat the web like public space, but treat their mobile devices like private space. They expect public space to be free but understand private space takes investment (they’ll buy patio furniture for their yard but not for their nearest park). Second, as internet access costs drop to nothing—and they will, facilitated by Google’s better-than-free operating system plans that will encourage companies to give away mobile devices and data access—people have more money to spend on digital content. There are many other factors, of course, but the bottom line is that consumers appear ready to pay for some digitally distributed content and web-enabled applications.

Call it what you will, but it’s clear these trends will impact your business.

And you should probably act now, because you can bet web 4.0 is on its way.

Tags: analytics, apps, paid content, web 3.0, web analytics