The new rules of the web

Have you ever interviewed an entrepreneur? They can usually be herded into three groups. The worst are the boring, the bored, the secretive (really boring), the liars and the full-blown delusional psychopaths. Then you get the insightful, highly experienced entrepreneurs that are changing their industry. I like them. Good strategy stories with a lot of tips for other entrepreneurs.

And then you get the entrepreneurs out of leftfield who leave you pondering for days over a few things they said, the new ways they are seeing the world or the radical implications their business model will have on other businesses and industries. Despite all the preparation you do before an interview you often can’t tell whether you are going to get the dud, the gold, or the leftfielders until part-way through the interview.

I got a couple of leftfielders last week, Guy King and Bevan Clark. Two blokes in their early 30s who met while doing research and development at Realestate.com.au. They left to build “why the hell can’t we do that” websites. You know, those websites that solve the frustrating problems people have in their lives.

For example: Guy got annoyed filling out registration pages to access free websites. So he spent a bit of free time in the “garage” creating Bugmenot, a site where users create a dummy account and share it with others so they can use the details and get through the registration pages by providing those phony details.

Well, my immediate reaction to this was a bit of moral outrage while I wondered about its legality. After all, people set up these registration pages to collect material on readers for advertisers, to satisfy licence requirements – in fact for all sorts of purposes. Surely that’s a fair deal. You get access to these free websites and in return you fill out some details about yourself.

So how does he justify that? Guy King, like many Gen Xers and most Gen Ys and certainly all Gen Zs, sees the internet as an “eco system”. If you are participating, you have certain obligations to the community. That’s right. They don’t owe you even their details in return for access to valuable content for free.

Instead, they see it like this: if you are benefiting from access to free and open information then you should be making your information free and open as well.

One of the reasons Guy has come to this conclusion is the assistance he has received from others in building his communities. For example, BugMeNot relies on people supplying phony details to get past the registration pages. Another site of his, RetailMeNot, is an aggregator of retail coupons that has been so successful because of the input of women in their late 20s who in their own time submit coupon codes for others to use, for no gain whatsoever.

Guy also comments in this story that you can’t “copyright facts”. In his mind, apparently free content is facts and information that belongs to everyone with no barriers attached.

By the end of the interview, you can clearly see the different values system operating in his mind and why that thinking is permeating the internet and changing the “value” of content.

Old media is in a tailspin at present trying to work out ways to get people to pay for content online and justify their expensive business models. Fairfax has already locked up its business content in a user-pays model that has been widely criticised for its complexity and irrelevancy.

And Rupert Murdoch and his cohorts are locking themselves away to work out how they can follow suit. Theirs is an old way of thinking: that people will always pay to access valuable information and the internet is really just another distribution model.

Instead, they should be trying to understand the new eco-system and the opportunities that lie within it.

After all, while these executives are locked up battling these giant problems, young entrepreneurs are spending their weekends building websites for $10,000, using search engines to launch them and spread the word and communities to build them. And like Guy, they are making money. Not much in Rupert’s terms, but don’t forget we are just at the start of this revolution.

For the sake of old media, I hope they invite some of the young blokes into their strategy meetings.