Commercializing Community

I liked Bruce Livingstone five minutes into my first conversation with him. Bruce is the founder and CEO of iStockPhoto.com, to my knowledge the first and largest of the so-called "microstocks." (To see the role microstock has played in the development of crowdsourcing, read here.) For one thing, Bruce likes to fly fish, and while it's possible there are untrustworthy types out there who also fly fish, I haven't met them. Second, he spent years touring the West Coast as the singer of a punk rock band, evidence that Bruce appreciates the finer things in life. But what I find most winning about Bruce is that he's an accidental entrepreneur. A designer and photographer, he started iStock because he didn't have the money to launch a traditional stock company. So he gave his photos away, and found a community of other talented people willing to give their photos away to. The value, as many content companies are still struggling to understand, wasn't necessarily in the thing itself.

I've got a special treat today. Bruce has written something for us here at Crowdsourcing.Com, a two-part meditation on how to make money off community. I think this question has become increasingly important to everyone in the culture industry, as communities have begun to replace the company as an organizing unit of labor. This is still terra incognita, which makes Bruce a pioneer of sorts. Without further ado, here's part one of Bruce's essay:

Is Social Networking Sustainable? Thoughts on Building a Social Network with Staying Power ...

The phenomenon of entertaining media sharing sites may be devouring itself with hundreds of flavor of the same offering. While advertising can be very successful as a model, for long-term success, it works best triangulated with other revenue methods, such as monetizing the user-generated content itself, or smart co-marketing agreements.With more than one million passionate members, including more than 33,000 contributing artists and an image or video file downloaded somewhere in the world every three seconds, iStockphoto has effectively turned community into commerce. Here are six principles I've adhered to as CEO of iStockphoto:

1) Put the Passion First

Here are a couple of the most notable quotes I've heard from iStock members: “iStock was built on passion, not on dollars” and "iStock is not a full-time job, but a lifelong passion." Threads and connections of people with common interests and shared passion for visual communication built the roots of iStock. The economy of micropayment stock followed.

2) Virtual Community is Only Sustained by Real World Gain

Social networking and social media sites are hot topics right now just like the mid-nineties when having a Web site made you "e"-enabled and cutting-edge. Natural selection will subsume the weakest players in this phenomenon. As competition grows, I believe the most economically successful social networks will be niche-focused with offerings that fill a real-world business need. For example, iStockphoto makes value-priced royalty-free images, illustrations and video available to a broad market of people who couldn’t afford great visual content before. We also give artists direct access to more than one million potential clients, more than they could ever reach alone. So, everybody stands to make money, or save money, while sharing and learning about our shared passions, pictures and video.

3) Build a Community to Fill the Gap, Not Follow the Leader

When I was a young punk, I thought I would pursue a career in music and spent years in bands and playing in dirty nightclubs. One day a kid showed up and could play EVERY instrument better than I ever could. I thought, ‘This kid is 10 years younger than me, and he’s kicking my ass. I’m not going to compete where I can’t win.’ That idea has guided many of my career decisions and I think it is a good rule.  So many people are trying to compete in social networking segments where there is already a clear winner. Why?  I say, look for the areas where no one is providing a solution, and create one. Then innovate like hell, stay fresh and keep growing. With iStockphoto, we saw a need for value-priced imagery for designers working on a budget or small business owners, and we filled that need. Others have come after us, but no one does it as well.

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of Bruce's essay ...

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In summary, A+ LTD is here to provide our customer the latest gadgets and accessories out there in the market. Besides our wide variety of consumer electronic products, we are also strives to bring the latest industrial news to our customer.

Terms & Conditions:
Please when making inquiry via e-mail, kindly provide a valid contact TELEPHONE NUMBER, this is to reduce online crime as signed under the agreement of the NEW SCOTLAND YARD*/(UK INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES).Police Home Office, UK Central Authority. A+ LTD reserves the right to control the quantity of any items offered for sale.
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