Over the last few months we’ve visited several brands, agencies and consultancies and a recurring theme that comes from the conversations is some urgent need to find or create the next YouTube or MySpace. Yesterday we presented a forthcoming PSFK related project to a phone manufacturer and one of the questions was how big can this grow? The answer was that we are building something new that we love with people who love what they’re doing – of course, we check it can scale – but we believe that it is impossible to set out to become the next Flickr, YouTube or MySpace because none of those sites set out to be what they became anyway. We’re just building something we’re very excited about and we hope others will be excited about.
We say all this because we keep noticing things in the media about the next next: here’s a piece by Reuters who think they’ve found the next YouTube of Video Gaming – and here’s a venture by News Corporation and NBC Universal that wants to be the next big video portal. Here’s something from the Telegraph on the latter:
Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corporation, said: “We’ll have access to just about the entire US internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want – professionally-produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”
“Entire US internet audience”? “consumers will get what they want”? “sites where they live?” Does this guy use the web for anything but check his stock price we wonder?
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The whole concept of aiming to be something like that smacks of dotcom silliness. And a quick peek at the history of our investments will show us how that turned out.
March 24th, 2007 at 1:44 am
I love the enthusiasm surrounding building something because you love it, but I question the notion that where you “end” up is unrelated to where you begin. In marketing, predicting the future is what it’s all about. I’ve heard this before from VC people and it scares me.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:53 am