Discovery as Internet Business Model

Much has been written and continues to be written about the forces that drive our behavior online. I really like, for example, Nick Yee’s articles describing the motivation of online game players.

Discovery. Its the one of Nick’s subcomponents that keeps popping up all over the place in my life. Maybe all of the online culture is one of Discovery (hey it would explain the value of Google). There is a constant quest to discover and try the enormous variety of new things accessible online. To be sure, this is a social computing thing. Its about discovering new territory and inviting your cool friends in for a visit.

Discovery experiences appear to be more important than ever today. For example, Alternate Reality Games, like Jane McGonigal’s The Lost Ring are attracting larger and larger audiences/players. The players become involved in a story because they are curious; curious to learn more, curious to see what this is about, curious to see if anybody else has found more.

But how do Businesses embrace Discovery?

• Viral Marketing campaigns that leverage consumer’s desire to Discover are really engaging. I showed my class the multifaceted Mini Men of Metal to give them a feel for this genre.
• Making us all beta testers allows us all to try businesses for free. I remember the pages of legal stuff I had to sign to be a beta tester back in the day (not to mention the stacks of 3.5 inch disks to install) ugh.

• Can we build new business models on discovery? Does giving users the ability to experience something free take away any chance that you would want to own it? A question you might ask the music industry. Last.fm, Pandora, Finetune allow users to explore music based on your own and others listening habits. Imeem and Muxtape allow you to create playlists of your own music that others can listen to and then buy.

One recent study suggests that Discovery business models may be increasing sales of music at Last.fm. I hope so. Given our unprecedented ability to search through the incredible variety of creative work, sharing the few things we like seems like what we are all doing online. Indeed, Discovery and associated sharing may be what drives the social networking phenomenon we are enjoying right now.

Tags: alternate reality games, Digital Business, Digital Entrepreneurship, discovery

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Digital Business, Digital Entrepreneurship, Digital Innovation, Gaming, Web 2.0, future internet, internet economics, ubiquitious computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.