I See You...
By David Fishman

The open door of the Internet seems to get wider everyday. As we check our competitors and our partners to see what is lurking behind door number 10, do we ever wonder who is checking our door number 10? Over the passed 18 months the Internet has quickly consolidated. There are fewer players and of course bigger players in each vertical, and in every vertical each player is watching and able to see everything his or her competitor’s launch and test. At the same time, there is a co-dependent need for cooperation. For anyone who has ever tried to succeed in this space, there is no way you can climb to any level without cooperation. However, has all of this cooperation created a visibility of what everyone else is doing that forces the scenario that you must eat or be eaten? Perhaps worse an end game where Darwinian theories force an implosion of the best we have to offer? Lets explore:

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With acquisitions, public offerings, and partnership occurring almost daily there becomes fewer total companies, which means fewer companies to watch, and fewer models to review. A basic practice that is often employed in every industry is, why be first when you can be second and just as successful without the same risks. The speed at which the online vertical moves creates a glaring affect of how quickly different competitors will change to match or out maneuver there competitor. The consolidation of a market that has almost no barrier to entry has made it that much simpler to keep an eye on, and to see what the other team is doing.

Watching what the other team is doing does not always demand a negative judgment. Often in the online space we are able to see what everyone else is doing because there needs to be a high level of dependence to successfully produce revenue. For example, a network will not be able to make money if it does not have some one to run the offer. An email house or highly trafficked sited needs data, advertisers who are promoted by networks create data and the cycle begins again. The cyclical nature of our industry allows for everyone to see what everyone else is doing. It also crumbles any barrier to entry allowing for a small publisher to become a big advertiser, or a medium size network. With the consolidation of companies the ability to login and review what is occurring on any given network makes everything visible.

The once invisibility or waxed cover that a company tried to preserve has been melted by the heat and speed of the Internet. The visibility of a company’s product, pricing, interaction with a client, model, and complete product is easily discernable in half a day’s research. Will this force each of us to act as the dog that eats everything in order to survive? Will this make it impossible for growth since everyone spends time doing what the guy next door just tried? Clearly this will not bring down or destroy the Internet media space. However, the question remains how does one really succeed if everything is visible?

Perhaps the answers to these questions are found by looking at passed successful companies. Those companies that were able to create an exit or develop a large enough company that the exit came in the form of revenue. These companies all have a few things in common. For sure, they all had an over abundance of resources in at least one specific area, financial, technical, sales, and/or organization. They all developed strategies within markets where the Internet does create visibility. The major growth of most companies that were able to overcome the shackles that keep us bound to earth, or at least our computers and office’s, has been in areas where the unending light of the Internet has not shone. These were the spaces where a company could truly blossom. The successful Internet company uses the power and growth potential of the Internet to fuel a project that has not been tapped by this same force. As the Internet continues to consolidate, it will continue to develop a more intertwined cyclical process where access to information is even more available. The companies that stand above the crowd will be those that have a strong foot hold in the Internet space but have developed a model that is diversified enough to provide its true growth in a vertical that is supported by the Internet not enveloped by it.

David Fishman
dfishman@ileadmedia.com