The F.A.G.S. space and new competition


Posted On: Tuesday - September 25th 2018 6:58AM MST
In Topics: 
  Websites  Media Stupidity  Big-Biz Stupidity

(continued from two posts back.)



The discussion in that last post was leading to: why is it very difficult for other players to seriously compete with these on-line Big-Net monopolies?

Even without resistance and internet sabotage by the monopoly players, it's very difficult to make a competing site. It's not hard to START it, but just to make it grow via user-input, because, well, you start off with few users. I'll now give an example.

Let's say you want to make a competing matchmaking website to OK-Cupid, or even make OK-Cupid to begin with, actually. This is another idea is which the useful content is user made. How do you get started? You've got this multi-million dollar investment money to make a visually-pleasing, highly-functional website, with a big database and tons of storage. You've got advertisement money. You've got the payment methods set-up and secure. Wait, but who's gonna pay?! Why would you join up unless there are many 100's or thousands of girls to pick from? If you are a girl, it's the same. Even if you are a BLTG-QWERTY type, you're really gonna want to see a whole lot of BLTG-QWERTs to choose from (somehow).

Do you see the catch? Without lots of users already on this dating site, the site is worthless and you won't get people to join. One thing one can do is be really crooked and put in lots of random pictures of hot chicks that are really unknown-to-us Ukrainian movie stars and see the guys sign up and just not get very lucky. Then, when lots of guys have been suckered on, actual available girls will sign up, and things could take off. A more legitimate way would be to advertise for girls to join for free (nothing to lose, but no men on there yet, so ....) You may have to PAY THEM to join to get the ball rolling, or give out free stuff to either sex who signs up.

It's just hard to get something like this going. However, the example of Facebook IS the 2nd networking site like this after MySpace, come to think of it. How'd they pull that off? Did people just get over MySpace? In the search "space" (sorry, for this meaning I can't write the word without using the scare stupidity quotes, I just can't...), 20 years ago there was lots of competition. Do you remember the Lycoses and Alta Vistas of yesteryear, reader? Those weren't the first either, but in the late 90's, I can recall clearly that there were 5 or so widely used search engines. The most usable one, I guess the best for the users, though not necessarily the best for mankind's future, won out. Kudos, but the Google monopoly has been fairly solidified over the last 15 years. For all of these internet giants, we need more competition. That is a function of we users learning other options and not being too lazy to do things differently. Becoming the competition is harder than building the proverbial better mousetrap in this "bigger-makes-better" world on-line.

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