To build the online media giants of tomorrow, companies need models where the costs of both content and distribution are near zero. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and countless others employ this model. These models allow scale to emerge at very low-cost.
And in these particular examples, the scale achieved is astronomical — on the order of hundreds of millions or billions of users. In thinking through how to build businesses around this scale, a lens emerges: what kind of traffic produces that scale?
In the case of social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr, the root activity on the site is the sharing of content. But the content shared on those sites differs widely, particularly around which content attracts the most engagement. Broadly, Facebook attracts photo sharing and light-hearted personal content. Twitter responds far better to true news and topical information sharing. Tumblr seems to resonate around entertainment and creative media. And Pinterest lights up around home design, apparel, food and other commercial items. (I am taking some liberties by generalizing, but you get the point.)

At the scale of Facebook, you could have your users share almost anything and still be able to build a large business, purely by loading the site up with lots of advertising that is (at very least) rudimentary targeted. At that scale, you can reach billions of dollars in revenue. And I believe, even at their scale, their ad load will need to further increase (along with their targeting abilities) in order to signficantly grow the business. (They also must move advertising off-site, as they are now doing, which I detail in this post.)

But if your service attracts particular verticals of content engagement, not all content is created equal, and some is much more valuable than others.

I divide traffic/content engagement into three buckets: topical, informational and transactional.

  • Topical content engagement is what is mostly taking place on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. It is comprised of posts generally linking to news, information, family, entertainment, photos, etc. The signal in this stream is the lowest of the three in terms of monetizeable traffic.
  • Informational content, often found on sites like SlideShare, Zillow and automotive blogs is the sharing of information that is near the top of the funnel for demand creation. Things like business white-papers or product reviews are perfect examples of informational traffic. This traffic has significantly more value than topical traffic, and excels at attracting endemic advertisers in the key verticals of travel, auto, tech, financial services, real estate and pharma, to name a few. Intent is well understood in this traffic and the signal is strong.
  • Transactional content is traffic that is essentially one click away from a purchase. Obviously, traffic found on ecommerce sites is the prime example of this and search traffic is a close second, but increasingly Pinterest is proving itself to be a massive source of high-converting traffic. Here, intent is clear and the signal is strongest.

I believe, with the Facebook share price correction, we are entering a period where sites based on topical content traffic are going to struggle in generating value for themselves. Much of the valuations around the consumer web are rationalizing, and because of that, investors are once again focused on understanding business models. Social media properties building traffic around informational or transactional content will be significantly more valuable than topical ones in this forthcoming period. This general notion that every social property with scale will be able to create their own custom “social ad” units and monetize themselves consistent with their earlier valuations, I think, is flawed, unless those properties are in the two higher tiers of content.