The Dead Letter Offices of Content Distribution

In the last year, I recently wrote what I hope will be an important contribution to some legal literature. Anyone familiar with legal literature will know what I mean when I say it has a rigid tediousness to it — half the text is littered with footnotes, the papers are too long, they are not very readable — resulting in many papers never getting read beyond a small community.

I ended up choosing to bypass the journals and just publish the paper online.  I didn’t want to go through the gatekeepers who controlled access to the journals and modify my paper to fit their preferences, and I had a sense more people would read — and more importantly interact with — my views if it was online where readers could get access to the paper through search engines, hyperlinks on blogs, and social sharing.  Certainly, there was a trade-off: I gave up the prestige associated within publishing within a prestigious title, but overall I wanted people — and not just those within a hyper-specialized subset of the legal community who read these journals — to read it as the views expressed in the paper had general application and more were likely to have practical currency if viewed by a general, practical audience.

I felt a little affirmation in seeing this quotation from the work of George Mason professor Ross Davies on the WSJ website about how law review circulation has plummeted to less than a university paper:

In 2011, for the first time since the U.S. Postal Service began requiring law reviews to track and report their circulation numbers, no major law review had more than 2,000 paying subscribers. The Harvard Law Review remains the top journal, but its paid circulation has declined from more than 10,000 during much of the 1960s and ’70s to about 5,000 in the 1990s to 1,896 last year.

This is an important example of how old forms of content, which are staid and sterile, are dying for numerous reasons, and the options — and continued opportunity — to replace them with more dynamic forms of content creation and distribution.

Design: Do Things That Don’t Scale

It’s too easy to write off pursuing the perfect experience on the assumption that it will not scale.  This Airbnb story provides a great lesson, why this can be self-defeating and, instead, why you should perfect the perfect user experience and then figure out how to scale.  This is an important less for us all.  From FastCompany:

Gebbia’s and Chesky’s [design] training pushes them to seek right-brained solutions to every problem. Early on, Airbnb was not getting much traction in New York. So the team flew out and booked rooms with two-dozen hosts to learn why. Users, they found, had no idea how to present their listings. “The photos were really bad,” says Gebbia, who typically sports Twizzler-red sneakers and thick-framed glasses that resemble lab goggles. “People were using camera phones and taking Craigslist-quality pictures. Surprise! No one was booking because you couldn’t see what you were paying for.”

They crafted a very untechy solution. “A web startup would say, ‘Let’s send emails, teach [users] professional photography, and test them,’ ” explains the jockish Chesky, a former bodybuilder who wanted to play pro hockey. “We said, ‘Screw that.’ ” The pair rented a $5,000 camera and snapped high-resolution photos of as many New York host apartments as they could. Bookings soared. By month’s end, revenue had doubled in the city. “Rinse and repeat,” Gebbia says. “When we fixed the product in New York, it solved our problems in Paris, London, Vancouver, and Miami.”

Airbnb now offers its hosts free professional photography services from more than 2,000 freelancers who have visited 13,000 listings across six continents. The startup realized the long-term benefits–such as improved aesthetics and verified property addresses–far outweighed the costs. Travelers are two and a half times more likely to book these enhanced listings, which earn their hosts an average of $1,025 per month. “Do things that don’t scale,” Chesky says, a sentiment that would be considered blasphemy at Google or Facebook. “We start with the perfect experience and then work backward. That’s how we’re going to continue to be successful.”

Design: The Journey Of A Billion Customers Starts With One Individual User

I always learn something from Jack Dorsey:

Dorsey is also talking about the process of making a business. He sees not the devil, but the humanity, in the details, particularly for his customers. “If we can perfect one experience for one individual, we can scale to every single one of the 7 billion people now inhabiting this earth,” he says.

This is from a nice profile of Dorsey and Square in Fast Company.

Our World (and the Internet’s) Unsettled Privacy Foundation

As we are seeing in the context of the Facebook IPO and Google’s privacy change, the FTC, European Union, and other jurisdictions are about to put privacy front and center.

The answers to those questions — ultimately societal and cultural questions — will determine the size of the Internet market, and whether Google and Facebook are truly companies worth 100s of billions or rather 10s of billions.  Society — and different jurisdictions may have different sensibilities — has to roughly balance two values.

One, we love and expect to get things on the Internet for free.  Pre-Internet, what was “free” — broadcast television and radio?  Now, much of the customer internet — tools of tremendous power, email, video, Twitter, social, and on and on — are free, and those are our expectations.  These are funded — think Google and Facebook — by tremendous advertising models.  Their ability to do so has democratized the power of information for people regardless of income or class.

Second, our notions of privacy, if we think of them, are being thoroughly tested. Our emails with our most sensitive thoughts are mined to deliver ads, but how many of us would allow our physical mail to be opened or our telephone calls to be monitored in the name of delivering ads.  Our search histories, Facebook profiles browsed, pictures opened are digital fossils of our thoughts, fears, desires, worries, etc.  In the past, most of these would have stayed private, otherwise risking profound embarrassment, but whether private or public would largely be in our control.  Now others control whether the windows to our histories are open or closed.  Perhaps, the targeting of ads can be made consistent with society’s evolving expectations of privacy, but what is to stop this data being used when considering insurance or hiring, being pulled out decades later when someone is running for office, or in satisfying someone’s general curiosity.  Even if the original collector of the information is held in check, what happens if a rogue employee or thief gets their hands on the information.

These are profound questions, both in terms of the way individuals and societies decide to maintain themselves, and in the size and nature of existing and future internet business models.  We will be spending enormous energies for decades balancing the competing and compelling values at stake, and it’s time for everyone to join in this conversation.