Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
What if the New York Times approached Amazon and said, "Look, you want to use our bestseller list? Fine! You've got an awful lot of traffic -- why don't you just link to our New York Times Book Review site every time you mention our name, and we can call it a day?"
An executive mired in old ways of thinking might recoil from such a proposal, which on the face of it would seem to further entwine the fortunes of Amazon and the New York Times rather than keeping them discrete and distinct. But it's in the Web's nature to blur boundaries. If the Times' partners at Barnes & Noble found such links upsetting, all the Times has to point out is that, as a result of such an arrangement, at least some Amazon customers would be likely to stray onto the Times site -- where they would be exposed to a full array of Barnes & Noble "buy" buttons.
My point is that the Times could have looked at Amazon's use of the bestseller list as an opportunity for another partnership and a chance to extend its reach. Rather than sending "cease and desist" letters, it could be growing its traffic.
It's not only "old media" companies that are making this kind of "hands off -- it's mine!" mistake. Over at eBay, the online auction giant, they've been calling out the lawyers, too.
EBay is unhappy that its users are taking the "feedback" credentials earned on its site, where auction participants "rate" one another's trustworthiness, and posting them on other auction sites elsewhere on the Web. The feedback data is proprietary, eBay says; the company, not the user, owns it.
Based on a clause in eBay's user agreement, the company is technically right -- but looking at the issue both from a user's perspective and from smart business thinking, it's way wrong. EBay is behaving as if its users are stealing its property by posting their feedback ratings on other auction sites. Instead, eBay should simply ask any site that posts eBay feedback info to link back to eBay with each re-post of a user's rating.
Rather than viewing its users as potential thieves, eBay could employ them as potential marketers. This kind of approach is pretty obvious to Web-savvy businesses these days; eBay's failure to grasp it is a sign that the pioneering auction house -- having grown too big or too quickly -- may be losing its touch.
At this point in Net history it should be almost too obvious to say this, but the lesson still demands repeating: In the online world, you can't make users do what they don't want to do just because it happens to be convenient for your business. You have to let them do what they want to do -- then align your business in such a way that what they want to do benefits you, too.
The latest enterprise to suffer for failing to follow this principle is Divx -- Circuit City's foolish scheme to create a digital video format that metered usage of home movie watching. Divx evoked little actual customer enthusiasm and lots of howls of protest and outrage; all it had going for it was a fervent wish on the part of Circuit City and its Hollywood partners that people would adopt it. When Circuit City pulled the plug on Divx last week, there were few mourners among the general public.
Divx won't be the last technology the industry tries to shove down consumers' throats. As MP3, the online music technology that millions of users have embraced, continues its rise, look for more Divx-style flops from a music industry desperate to squash MP3 and substitute some other scheme more to its liking.
If the recording industry has any brains it will rethink its position. Instead of trying to push back against the river of online human behavior, it should be thinking, "How can we turn this to our advantage?" It shouldn't take too long to come up with some creative ideas.
As technology keeps redefining the nature of owning information, fighting to defend every last chunk of intellectual property on the Net may look like a sensible strategy. But in the long run, it's like trying to hold on to a snowball in the sun.
Get Salon in your mailbox!