It is official. If you had any doubts before, I claim Technorati to be a media company. It is a NEW media company. But, it is a media company, nonetheless.
Why claim this now? No. Not because they put me on their little list. Because they get it. They realize that content production is now free from the constraints of cost. Content's distribution costs are zero. They have been for a little while now. More importantly and more recently.... With legions of "WE" generating content, content production is now zero cost. The only thing left is to aggregate it in interesting ways - that content producers respect - and then serve advertising.
Not much different than a cable channel or a satellite company or even a movie theatre chain. Is it?
Imagine a News Corporation, Disney or Viacom with no distribution and no production costs! After you change your pants, Mr. Murdoch, read on:
Have you seen Technorati's Live 8 aggregator? To all you techies, I know you'll get what they are doing as soon as you see it. It is photos, bookmarks and blog posts from around the web all aggregated into a nice looking web page. All this "content" discusses the topic of Live 8, a benefit concert tour. An event.
Now, go do a search on google for Live 8. Notice that technorati's aggregator ranks higher than the actual site for Live 8. As it should. And it probably has spawned all kinds of traffic to it and away from it from people checking their referrers, their inlinks and their outlinks. It probably has many people subscribed to it in their other aggregators. It has many people linking to it with a technorati tag when they make their post. And more. In summation, they are getting a lot of attention from people interested in Live 8. More than anyone else. More than any other media outlet is.
So, what happens when you do this for all kinds of events? Think about the money that goes into (or comes out of) the NFL, the Olympics, or even local nightclubs and fundraisers. What if you were to private label this thing inside of an event website that does registration, sells tickets, sends invitations, gives free tickets to the evangelizers, lists sponsors, generates leads for them? Now, you have the power of the people - pushing and promoting your event - and evangelizing your event's brand out on the open web. And you are monitoring that in real time. Now, think beyond events. You can do this for anything. Movies. Deodorant. Books. Now, you have something. A revenue model. And it aint just google adsense.
And as we just got used to thinking of google as a media company. Now, we have to get used to thinking of blog search and aggregation tools as media companies. Our media companies.
Mine should say, I am one of #,### people right now talking about how technorati knows how many people are talking about live 8 right now.
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