The one thing I always say to mentees who are targeting consumers on the Internet is that they are in a battle for attention. This amazing graphic put together by media consultants Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan for All Access Music—really points out the sheer amount of activity vying for (or constantly stealing) our attention. The PC Mag article Every Minute Online Is a Battle for Consumer Attention sub-titled This not-to-scale visualization of what is happening on the internet every single minute of every single day this year should underscore why you have a hard time getting anything done, enables you to compare the 2018 internet minute with the 2019 internet minute. The comparison shows just about every type of activity increasing.
Note the activities are a mix of consumption (dollars spent online) and creation (2.1 million snaps created).
For founders these images are daunting pictures of all the competition for attention on the Internet. It may be enough for you to think about off-net activities. A colleague and I were interested in entering the “rating” business many years ago, so we watched carefully from the sidelines. Yelp, of course, won the battle for a standalone ratings service. We believe that one reason was that they literally had feet on the ground in areas where they planned to launch and put on events in each region for prospective users. Their competition never got out from behind their computers and probably thought that they could build the business simply by sitting at their desks.
If there is a lesson in these numbers it’s that founders may want to consider what types of off-net activities can help build their brand and generate revenue. While the events marketplace is also very crowded perhaps the right combination of online marketing, social media, and events can help a B2C company breakthrough.
I’d like to see what an off-net minute activities chart looks like for a typical consumer!
Mentorphile 