“Actually I haven’t read a single article. I don’t want to read them. I see a wall of text and I just look at the picture and click next.” Thus Andrey Ternovskiy, the Russian high school student who is the creator of web sensation, Chatroulette, in a New York Times interview published yesterday. The remark is taken out of context, being as it was in response to a question about the media attention he and his service have been receiving. But the part of the statement that to me seems most interesting, regardless of context, and perhaps characteristic of the service itself, is the end: “… and click next.” There is an impatience reflected in it, a lack of pause, that is consistent with the concept of a video chat room in which each random participant can turn off any other participant instantly, and apparently does so more often than not, click/next.
Whether or not the concept of surfing the web in this fashion – taken to the level of surfing people – has any broader significance, is an interesting question to consider. (See, for example, this recently closed Guggenheim Museum exhibit in which the art consisted of strangers striking up brief conversations with museum-goers as they spiraled up the ramp. Is there a parallel between Chatroulette and such modern art?) Regardless of how deeply you want to delve into the subject, however, the briefness of interaction, the flightiness and inconsequence of visits, the speed and impatience, draw attention to an evolution that I believe is occurring in media and entertainment. If viewership, audience, traffic, to a given web destination can for purposes of argument be thought of as “inventory” – in the sense of such inventory being offloaded to advertisers as valuable commercial goods – this asset then has an increasingly brief “shelf life.”
Mashable published a noteworthy overview of Twitter’s traffic patterns the other day. Based on the somewhat arbitrary but reasonable definition that “an active or ‘true’ Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people and had tweeted at least 10 times,” only 21% of Twitter users are active users. According to the same analysis, 34% of users have never sent out a single tweet, and almost all of the messaging found on the Twitter service is the product of roughly one quarter of the user base. Regardless of how Twitter defines its business model, as it presumably will soon, its enterprise value is predicated on a voluminous web presence. While that may be, the quality of “inventory” is as significant as its quantity in any analysis.
I am further reminded of a blog article that drew much attention a few weeks ago, in which the author asserted that certain web entrepreneurs are more astute in the ways of generating traffic than others. Without getting into the details of such tricks and secret recipes of traffic accumulation – most of which are surely familiar terrain to the most popular consumer facing web services (e.g., Facebook, Zynga) – it is legitimate to wonder about the value of the massive inventory that has been accumulated, and whether it is grossly “overstated,” to keep to the accounting terminology. If we are talking about some meaningful fraction of users who visit a site by accident, by hacking, or merely out of fleeting curiosity, as hundreds of millions of other such random individuals seem to be visiting a site, we have to wonder how sustainable such an audience really is. Surely there will be an eventual finality to the number of random and accidental viewers that may stumble upon a given website even once.
For additional thoughts about enterprise valuation and how the concept of “perpetuity” fits in, see here.
