Silly Is Serious Business
If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.
Case in point: the week of April 21 and the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. That Tuesday marked a very important day for our country. A major competition between visible and opposing candidates was decided. It was a vote that is sure to generate publicity and campaigning over the coming months, and it will no doubt continue to occupy center stage of our national attention. Of course, I’m talking about “American Idol.”
That week, the two most popular television broadcasts were “American Idol” and “American Idol” (Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively). The third and fourth were both “Dancing with the Stars.” Check out the table below (from Nielsen Media Research; click on all tables and charts to make them bigger) and perhaps you’ll arrive at the same conclusion I did: When it comes to consumption, we prefer entertaining fare.
Likewise on the Web, Google News’s (GOOG) most popular searches in 2007 are by and large entertainment related (from Google Zeitgeist 2007):
Here’s a graph from Alexa.com of traffic to the three most popular non-search-engine Web sites and the most popular news Web site.
And here’s a graph from a Morgan Stanley (MS) “Internet Trends” report from 2008 of two of those same Web sites and the two most popular search-engines:
That last graph made a pretty big splash when it debuted at the Web 2.0 Expo conference; its title was “YouTube + Facebook Views > Yahoo! or Google…” Or to put it another way: today, fun is more powerful than utility.
Consider the value of other companies that deliver entertainment: Disney (DIS), Time Warner (TWX) and Sony (SNE) have a combined market cap of over $168 billion. Gross revenue for the NFL and MLB last year exceeded $12 billion. Apple (AAPL) made nearly $2 billion through iTunes music sales alone. Social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and widget users can, well, share favorite “American Idol” moments, send virtual margaritas or trout slap each other.
So seriously Kara, you have to try throwing a sheep or two. As Dr. Seuss said: “If you never have, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”
Keith Rabois is vice president of strategy and business development at Slide, which makes widgets and applications such as SuperPoke!
Comments
My simple axiom summarizes this point effectively, I think:
There has never been an application, game or otherwise, that is “as fun as possible”. Put another way, there’s no upper limit to the amount of fun that a user can or wants to have.
That’s a pretty powerful economic opportunity. In the near-term, “Funware” applications (that marry the best of game design with more utilitarian pursuits) will radially redefine both the definition of a game and the standard for web application design.
There are a lot of apps that use Funware principles, and the list is growing rapidly. For more info, check out my blog on the subject of Funware at http://blog.rmbr.com/
-G
Posted by Gabe Zichermann at May 14th, 2008 at 3:27 pmWhile I wouldn’t go as far as you and default to the assumption that being funny equates to creating a high margin business, I do think that being fun is an absolute product virtue.
Why? When product marketing and product management fit so fully hand in glove, you are destined for breakout market success, and being fun/funny has all sorts of memetic goodness attached to it.
Stating the obvious, in Web 2.0-ville, market success and financial success are not always one and the same but it is certainly a great place to start.
For more fodder on fun as product virtue, here is a post I wrote on Nintendo’s Wii and its fun factor in action:
http://thenetworkgarden.com/we.....fun-a.html
Cheers,
Mark
Posted by Mark Sigal at May 14th, 2008 at 3:44 pm