I was musing today, about how quickly Shelfari has caught on with my bookworm friends. This little network launched in October 2006 and is a product of Taste Makers, Inc., a company that I’m assuming will quite soon be targeting areas like movies, music, food, and any other consumer products that people can be enthusiastic about. The shopping giant Amazon allegedly invested about a million into Shelfari earlier this year, and that’s a fairly good indication of how you would possibly make money from an idea like this.
It’s interesting because this was roughly the idea I was operating under with gibbity, filmcrowd, and a third booklovers’ community site that I never got to properly sink my teeth into, back in 2005. The social media space is exquisitely deep if you know where to look and there’s so much online activity surrounding the Harry Potters and Da Vinci Codes of the world that it’s impossible to ignore. Of course, I had no idea how to properly make something like this work back then, so both attempts eventually just faded. That’s fine though, at least I know now that the idea itself was sound.
My original strategy was to hit gamers (http://gibbity.com), movie lovers (http://filmcrowd.com) and then bookworms (never settled on a name, but was leaning towards http://bookcrowd.com), in that order. Gamers came first because there was only one other social-review competitor in the game space back then, and I was an ex-gamer who was seeing his game-time slowly being eroded by his work-hours. Movie lovers came next because I personally loved writing short reviews of films and comparing them against other people’s. At the time, Rotten Tomatoes was the only other place online where average people could do something like that in a structured fashion (of course there were movie blogs and forums, but there was no real way to see users’ contributions side-by-side).
And I wanted to target the booklovers last because I felt that it was going to be very challenging, and here’s why:
The problem with any social-media site is that you operate on the assumption that you always have something to review. Take movies, for example. On the average, the US sees over 350 minor/major releases every year, about 7 new movies per week. The average person will probably see a new movie once a month, but the enthusiast will be spoilt for choice all year round, and that’s not even counting the foreign-film crowd. From a social-media perspective, this means that a loyal user will have a reason to come back to the site all the time, because they will constantly have new content to contribute.
Games are similar, in that there are over 500 game releases in various formats (PC, console, portables) every year. You would technically never run out of stuff to write about. Here’s the difference between movies and games though. It takes you two hours to appreciate a movie in its entirety. It takes days, with most PC or console games. The duration of consumption is vastly different between the two industries, which is why I saw very slow turnovers with gibbity relative to filmcrowd.
Let’s take that distinction one step further: consider that it only takes about 4 minutes to appreciate a song in its entirety. Is it any wonder that your average Last.fm user has over 5,000 tracks scrobbled, which is probably more movies than the average human will watch in their entire lifetime?
Now let’s take the reasoning in the opposite direction, with books. Where it takes the average human 2 hours to appreciate a movie and a couple days to appreciate a game, it takes over a week to appreciate a full-length book (Harry Potter fanatics notwithstanding). Most booklovers will take their time, reading several books at once. I’ve personally always got about 5 or 6 different things I read simultaneously, and the whole exercise takes me over a month to finish. What does this mean for the ye olde booklover site? Well, possibly that there will be a very marked slowdown in user-contributed content, once your users have gotten over the initial hump of building their personal bookshelf.
Also, consider the relatively miniscule size of the collections: very few people on Shelfari will have more than a thousand books in their shelf, and those are the hardest of the hardcore. I could trounce any of these people with the number of songs in my 16gb iPod, never mind the 15,000 or so songs in my whole collection. (And I’ll bet anything that the real average site-wide would be about 3 dozen books or less, per user.)
And that right there is the other important difference between booklovers and musiclovers. Virtual bookshelf management is friggin’ hard work. You have to type in the book title yourself, decide which of the search-results matches the item you mean, then you have to rate the book manually (and never mind writing a review for it; that’s a different level of commitment all together). In Last.fm (or I should say, AudioScrobbler), all of that is done for you; all I have to do is login and take credit. The scrobbler watches your iTunes/WMP 24/7, as you use it, automatically updating your Last.fm profile in real-time. My handful of Last.fm friends know that I’m a renewed Radiohead fanboy before I do.
Where am I going with this meandering analysis? Nowhere, really. Just pointing out the various pitfalls that each social-review community will eventually have to face and figure out a way around. I love looking at these applications and thinking about how they work, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from the perspective of the content itself. I have no doubt in my mind that Shelfari will continue to grow its userbase over time, but I do think that the level of activity will be very challenging to keep up.
There’s certainly something to be said for simply getting more and more new users to join up, but that results in width, not depth. You need to motivate the users in the middle — not the hardcore loyalists and not the newbs — to be constantly discussing stuff that they have a personal interest in, otherwise there’s a definite danger that the whole thing will degenerate into a glorified NYTimes Top 10 list. Case in point: can you make a guess what the most talked-about books on Shelfari are? I’ll give you a clue: 7 of them start with the initials H and P.