Category Archives: content

Content, Community, Commerce and all that Jazz

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Over the course of years, lots of startups have tried to leverage their content/community to sell stuff to users but have seen limited success. So much so that one has to try really hard to find some examples of  content or community platforms across the world that have managed the crossover at a reasonable scale.


Can you name a startup (content or community) that is able to successfully sell stuff at a reasonable scale to their users?

Just so we are clear, here by commerce I mean transactions (visitors/user of a content or community platform buying stuff on the platform itself). While monetisation via ads and as affiliates have been proven models for long, commerce has been successful in rare exceptional cases. Through the course of a series of posts I’ll try to explore why some platforms could get the commerce play working while others languished.

The Trifecta

What exactly are the 3Cs:

This slide from a ‘Mary Meeker Internet Report’ gives a good summary of The 3Cs

The Three Cs go long back in Time

The Three Cs are probably as old as Web 1.0
(Pic: An article published in Guardian in 2000 about 3Cs)


How to Think about 3Cs
If you think about it, there are two broad ways for the 3Cs to come together.

  1. Content/Community Platforms adds Commerce (Houzz, Polyvore)
  2. Commerce Platforms adds Content/Community (Amazon, StitchFix)

One way to look at Content and/or Community to commerce journey is like a funnel. Content/Community in that case will be Top of the funnel (TOFU) and Commerce, the final transaction will be Bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

That is, more people will engage with the content and/or community (TOFU) and some of them will end up purchasing goods aka commerce (BOFU).

Case 1: Content/Community Platforms adding Commerce
Case 2: Commerce Platforms adding Content/Community

Majority of popular consumer startups fall in two quadrants (Started as Commerce or Started as Content/Community). It is difficult to recall any startups that had both Content/Community and Commerce play from start.

Starting Points for Some Popular Startups

Empirically speaking, it looks like the journey from Commerce to Content/Community (Case 2) is well within the reach. Amazon has been doing it for ages in multiple ways (UGC and Content Acquisitions), in India I think Nykaa is doing a reasonable job. If one spends more time I’m confident a lot of successful examples of this category will come out.

However, the journey from Content/Community to Commerce (Case 1) seems extremely arduous with only a handful successes.

Challenges in Leveraging a Content/Community Platform for Commerce

  1. Low Captive User Base: Most users of content platforms are actually non logged-in visitors (Organic/Social Traffic over Direct Traffic). How will you monetise a user base that isn’t regular/loyal.
  2.  Positioning: While it’s much easier to trust a content/community platform, when it comes to making purchases, the bar is fairly high. People prefer to go to experts. Who would you trust to deliver your order without any nonsense, Amazon or some upcoming content/community site?. Increasingly the mindshare in various commerce categories is already taken (Think Amazon, Swiggy, Zomato, Goibibo, Bookmyshow, Paytm, Myntra). Given the low switching cost on Internet, this challenge is particularly hard to cross.
  3. Expertise: E-commerce, however easy it might appear from outside requires significant operational expertise. Most folks continue to underestimate it, resulting in bad user experience and dissatisfied users that will never buy from you again. Since people underestimate what goes in getting e-commerce experience right, they are perennially underinvested (also, in most cases it is structurally difficult for a content company to invest a lot of resources in such endeavours). Lastly, in each category you are competing with the best in the game (product and/or resources wise)
  4. User Experience (for commerce): This one is particularly true for hosted community platforms. Imagine a community of food lovers, sports lovers on Facebook/Whatsapp etc. As mentioned in #1, the users in such cases are captive to the platform in question not to your group and to make things worse at one end, the platform experience doesn’t facilitate smooth e-commerce (Imagine buying something from a FB/WA group) and on the end hand, you can’t possibly migrate these users to your own site/app which might have a better commerce experience.

Because of the reasons mentioned above I believe it is extremely tough to upgrade from content/community to commerce. I’ll also go to the extent of saying in most cases the platforms in question are better of monetising via traditional channels ads, affiliates, events etc than to start their own e-commerce. 

As of the exceptions to the rule like Houzz, we’ll try to figure out what makes them tick in the next post in this series. 

Understanding Twitter’s Discovery Problem

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I like many of you, am an internet junkie i.e I spend more waking hours of my day on it than off. I started using Twitter in 2007, a few months after it’s launch and have happened to stuck with it for FIVE long years with steady unswerving loyalty. Not just this, thanks to the tweetdeck (a twitter client) I have it open on my system all the time. Among other things Tweetdeck allows me to manage multiple accounts(my personal acc @mayankdhingra and the @dialabook account), track keywords/hashtags among other things.

So via these 2 accounts I follow close to 2,000 people and have access to at least 3 keywords which I track. As you can imagine, it makes for enormous amount of data in my TL’s (Twitter Timelines) and as expected it gets overwhelming at times. But, that’s not the worst part for me. The worst part is that I like some other information/content junkie can’t have enough of sites/blogposts/news etc and thus I feel bad about not being able to fish out interesting/useful content from my timeline.

Yesterday after coming back home at  3:30 AM or so when I logged on twitter and tried to skim the TL, I found this interesting(thought not much useful yet) website  for tracking multiple couriers, given my business it will come in quite handy. Similarly while checking TL of someone I found this gem for indian indie music.

Think about it, if I weren’t to go and proactively check out past tweets, I wouldn’t have been able to find these, not in the near future at least and this is what pains me.

Discovery(content or otherwise) can happen in two ways

  1. Planned  (Organized/Structured)
  2. Accidental (Random)

If I log onto a particular blog/site everyday for news it is a planned way to discover content (applicable offline too), if I have subscribed to a newsletter it’s planned discovery. However, if someone whom I follow on twitter, RT’s an interesting link and I am online and it appears in my TL it is accidental or random. The major reason I have stuck on twitter despite all the weird ADSD people and their antics is Content and Twitter is by far the best place to get the content dope.

While we all try our best to plan to get the content we’d like to read, it’s the accidental discovery that interests me more. Though by nature this is random and in a way that’s it’s beauty. Out of nowhere you get something that could have an impact. For sake of perspective

  1. Scope for Planned Discovery:
    Source : 1- 100 (upper limit) blogs/sites
    Average Posts/Day on these sources: 5-20(upper limit)
    Total posts/stories accessible: 2,000

  2. Scope for Unplanned Discovery:
    Number of people I follow(from my personal account): 500 or so
    Number of people they follow: 300 or so
    Number of weblinks that a person shares in a day: 5
    Total posts/stories accessible: 500*300*5 = 75,00,00

Depending on my usage(or active usage) of Twitter, I discover less than 0.01% of all content available (Think of the stuff I am missing while I type this sentence)

However, like in other aspects of life I want to be able to control this discovery and try to  bring some method to the madness. I mean, why should I miss really interesting stuff just because I wasn’t scanning my TL and writing this blogpost when somebody tweeted it or how can I increase my chances of finding out stuff about my areas of interest? This is precisely the  Twitter’s Discovery Problem  I am talking about. It’s like a river stream in which I can swim anytime and come out anytime, but what happens when I am not swimming or even when I am there.

How does the relevant content find you and not the other way around?

One of the ideas which a Tarun had was to have an app that rates various links being shared in one’s Timeline based on the number of RT’s it got, so that we get to see what’s popular (weblinks) in our TL’s. Interestingly, before he could find time to built the app, twitter started doing this themselves in their daily newsletters

The problem is twin fold

  1. How to get access to a bigger source of content
  2. How to filter the content for quality and personal preferences

Some top of the head ideas

  1. Further simplify the process of sharing content both on and off twitter. I see a post on iPhone app design and I know 5 people in my network would love it but how to share this with them?  (Think email, think tagging,
    think hashtagging etc)
  2. Sticky tweets: I find something interesting and want most people who read my tweets to be able to see it not just when I tweeted but also for the entire day. How about having that tweet appear on top of my TL and not get hidden in my stream. Sometweets could also appear differently visually/design wise
  3. A hashtag discovery engine: There are tonnes of hashtags people create daily, a smaller subset of this happens in our timelines too. What if people were to use hashtags more and then there’s a page which has a hashtag cloud. The most popular hashtags appear BIGGER AND BOLDERwhile less popular ones  not so. That’s a brand new way to discover content based on how people in my network(or otherwise) tag it.PS: No, this is not the same as twitter trends you genius.
  4. Favorite Tweets: This is undeniably one of the most underused and undervalued feature of twitter, what if we could also share stuff people favourite more prominently? If 50 people in my TL have favourited I might as well would want to check it out

These are just some of the ideas I could think of while writing this blog post but I am sure there’s a lot of value that can be unlocked here.

You could have just missed this post, had it not been for accidental/random discovery. Think about it…