Chartreuse Explains The Importance Of Chickens While Brian Clark Explains The Rest Of The Universe

Quiz time!

Just one question.

You’re playing a game of chicken.

What’s the only credible way to get your opponent to swerve?

If you can answer that and why you will have a solid understanding of the finances of Web 2.0

Let’s start from the beginning.

Web 1.0 was about taking the real world and putting it online.

Toys R Us became Toys R Us.com

Nike became Nike.com

One of my favorite commercials of that era showed two old men staring the amazing moves of a running back. “He’s not just running,” one of the old men said. “He’s running.com“. The commecial emphasized what people already knew. This internet stuff was powerful.

So business flocked online and websites were thrown up all over the place and business models were based on the fact that they had audiences watching them.

Web 2.0 is different. It’s upside down. It’s Army of One. It’s power to the people. It’s the human algorithm.

Now audiences create the content, they categorize it, and they tell you how they really feel about it.

That’s the difference. And it’s huge.

Tagging. Blogging. Social-Networks. All do the same thing.

They allow the audience to segment and classify themselves in a million ways.

They give the audience power.

But here’s a secret.

By giving your audience more power you are actually giving yourself more financial power if you know how to use it.

It’s like playing chicken.

In a game of chicken the only credible way to get your opponent to swerve is by very visibly throwing your steering wheel out the window and having him or her see you do it.

This way, you can’t change course even if you wanted to.

It’s entirely up to your opponent whether to lose—or die.

Giving up power has given you power. 

The odds now favor you.

In the Web 2.0 world financial power lies in all the information that consumers are giving you by you giving up the wheel.

Look at Google.

Look at Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing). 

These are the most profitable advertising business models around, because consumers tell advertisers what they’re looking for first, rather than advertisers telling consumers what they should buy and hoping for the best.

The audience is running the entire thing.

The internet is the largest direct marketing platform on the planet and now the audience can tell you exactly what it wants.

Who needs a sustainable business model when you have audience? 

Get it?

[reloaded: this post came about after a series of emails between myself and Brian Clark. It took a while but we finally agreed we were saying the same thing (he just didn’t like my words). I took parts of his emails to me and my own and put this together. I would call it a collaboration but that would be taking credit away from myself. 🙂

Brian Clark, by the way, is the author of Viral Copy, which is flowing through the internet like a…virus (man, how could you not see that coming?). He also runs the site Copyblogger.]

[revolutions: Well Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize last year for showing that “a party can strengthen its position by overtly worsening its own options.” ]

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