Web 2.0 “the movie” by Techcrunch

Web 2.0 “the movie” is a compilation of interviews with startup executives by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch. It’s 24 minutes long and has some truly compelling tidbits. First of all, the consensus is that we aren’t in a bubble. The growth that’s happening this time around is what we were hoping for in Web 1.0, but which is now possible because we have better business models (targeted ads and premium service fees seem to be the most popular) and more people online. Also this time around, companies aren’t being pushed to IPO in six months on nothing more than fumes and a ghost of a product. Instead, they have more time to build a great product and a loyal audience. There are several more juicy tidbits that you should know about:

One of the execs mentioned that there are about 1 billion people online now. Think about that. One in six people on earth use the internet. That’s incredible. It’s also exciting to the max. There’s never been a better time to be a startup. Even if you’re entering a field with strong competitors, there is a huge pie out there, and no one owns it all. So for instance, if you feel your U.S. compeitors are too strong, why not specifically target a different country? Like Japan, or all of Latin America at once. The reality is we’re still in the infancy of the web. There are infinite possibilities for a company with great vision and execution. And like one of these startup founders said, there is far more investment money than good ideas, so hone your idea and you can find the money you need to get it done.

More than one executive talked about the power of blogging and syndicating your content. One argued that companies buy ads for the inbound links, but they can get those inbound links if they are open and allow their content to be distributed. Along the same vein, Mike revealed that Techcrunch has about 80,000 rss subscribers and 100,000 regular visitors to the website. What really excites him is that 60% of his audience have their own blogs, so his influence is multipled who knows how many times.

Many execs alluded to how the role of the consumer is changing. Consumers are now producers, and want to be, plain and simple. Ignore that fact to your detriment. I particularly liked hearing how Ebay runs their Ebay wiki. The exec telling the story called it the “seed and weed” approach. Ebay writes some articles and makes sure that the crappy ones are removed, but they don’t produce all the content themselves. The majority of the content comes from this new breed of producer-consumers. The Ebay wiki is essentially an outlet for their evangelized base. This means customer support costs Ebay less, and at the same time, the enthusiastic users are helping other users learn and become enthusiastic too. It’s easy to see that this is the way support should be approached.

One last insight has to do with marketing. Aaron Cohen of Bolt pointed out that Youtube got a huge growth boost early on from the “Lazy Sunday” phenomenon. If you aren’t aware of it already, “Lazy Sunday” was a hilarious SNL music video skit that was uploaded to YouTube and then went viral, bringing in millions of visitors. It was part of the story that YouTube would tell to journalists, and it was written about quite a bit. The “Lazy Sunday” phenomenon was also fueled by the MySpace phenomenon. Youtube was the first video site that allowed users to easily paste videos into their MySpace pages. Once people visited YouTube to see “Lazy Sunday”, they would try YouTube and realize that it was the easiest video site ever created. All of YouTube’s features were crucial to its success, but it was one hilarious video that sparked growth early on and brought them the attention they needed to reach a tipping point.