caito

These days, the most successful sites are those that understand that the Web isn’t merely a delivery channel for their product, but a larger ecosystem in which they play a part.

[...] Any business model that relies on customers never discovering your competitors is built on a shaky foundation indeed (via Want to Keep Customers? Set Them Free - BusinessWeek).

Jesse James Garrett* has a really good point there. Trying to lock-in a customer into your offering instead of making available what you know is best for him seems one of the most weird, anti-business ideas one can think of.

Of course, every business tries to generate the highest revenue per customer but if you look at it over the customer life-time, you’ll end up making less by locking him/her in than best-serving your customers’ needs.

One thing very interesting for media companies is that they have really great content and a lot of their customers are indeed, one way or another, “publishers” by themselves - publishing own websites, blogs, etc. Why can’t we, the big media players, provide our content free-of-charge to these people, actually develop an API (like Flickr, eBay, …) so that those customers can access our content and integrate it into their websites?

E.g. if Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) would allow adding hovering-links for free into your website, you might actually link to EB directly. So, if I’m writing about, lets say, about Mount Everest, it could be a mouse-over link, which would show information about Mount Everest when a user moves over it - information retrieved from EB.

Other information source could be National Geographic, Bloomberg, and a lot more. Including images (maybe small images where, in order to see the original, you have to click on it and are then transferred to the originating site) and so on. — well, just an idea to give you some food for thought…

*: I think, without offense, the name is really funny - Jesse James Garret. The only way to top it is Jesse James Billy Garrett-Dalton.