Scott Karp: You Can't Own Social Media (A Lesson for Attention?)

In a post contrasting Google's successful approach to AdSense with News Corp's difficulties with MySpace, Scott Karp makes the case that the key to monetizing social media is recognizing that it can't be owned:

[T]the reason why News Corp is struggling to monetize MySpace is that most people who visit MySpace are not visiting “MySpace,” the News Corp media property — they are visiting EACH OTHER.

Contrast what News Corp is trying to do by directly monetizing the content it “owns” on MySpace...with what Google did with AdSense.

AdSense has been so successful because it does not attempt to own either the content platform or the content itself — note that Google does not run ads on Blogger per se — they provide bloggers with a distributed, self-serve, revenue-sharing ad platform to run the ads themselves, and then Google takes a (big) piece of the action. But they don’t have to own Blogger to do it — owning Blogger simply allows Google to provide the blogging platform for free and thus drive more content creation that feeds AdSense.

News Corp needs to stop thinking in terms of “owning” MySpace’s page views — advertisers don’t want to advertise on those pages because News Corp doesn’t control the content. And MySpace users don’t want the ads appearing on “their” pages uninvited.

I think Scott's argument is equally valid with regard to attention, given that the intense attention-generating dynamics at work within social networks is what's driving the surge of interest in communities like MySpace. One of AttentionTrust's founding principles is that WE own our personal attention data. Companies provide the platforms on which this data is created, but it's our data. Traditional approaches to monetizing this data have been based upon company ownership, siloed aggregation and consumer lock-in, all of which are fundamentally in opposition to the idea of users in charge. But companies seeking to "own" our attention are going to seem as outdated as News Corp.'s attempt to "own" MySpace as a platform--and they'll be missing out on the opportunities to be created by putting users in charge.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data scott+karp news+corp myspace google adsense blogger