Here’s a fascinating and invigorating idea from Jeff Bercovici, Portfolio‘s media blogger:
[Imagine that] as you browse FT.com, you have a small status bar at the bottom of your screen, akin to the “life bar” in first-person shooter games that shows you how healthy or injured your character is. In this case, the status bar shows you how many free page views you have left.
So far that’s not really a new idea, it’s just a new interface-feature for their current hybrid subscription model (which allows deadbeats like myself to register and view a small handful of articles per month)… But here’s this:
If you want to exceed your quota but you don’t want to pay, there are other ways. In video games, you can usually replenish your life bar by collecting floating gold coins or stars or mushrooms or what have you; why not do the same on a newspaper site? Scatter them about randomly so that readers are rewarded for exploring different sections of the site, reading to the end of stories, etc…
Silly as this idea might seem now (Bercovici himself is “really not sure” whether he’s joking or not), my gut is telling me there are some really powerful insights to be extracted from this — insights to help us overcome our muddled old assumptions and shine a light on new ways of thinking about how we experience information online.
Bercovici seems to be missing most of the major lessons we’re learning from social media. He acknowledges the importance of intrinsic motivation, but the coin metaphor (and more importantly, the underlying assumption that content providers are puppetmasters pulling the strings to lead users around) betrays how deeply he his idea is still affected by old, extrinsically-oriented assumptions.
I’m not sure if this is really what he was getting at, but what I take from it is this: if users aren’t going to pay, at least content providers can encourage (or compel) users to add value. By now most of the thriving media sites already recognize the principle of engagement, offering opportunities for users to contribute in small ways; many readers have become enthusiastic prosumers who comment and participate in forums, live chats, surveys, etc.
Now the video game model introduces the element of objective incentives and rewards — something like the “karma” already used on sites like Slashdot and Reddit. Again, this isn’t exactly new; it just reformulates notions everyone should already appreciate via social media.
In fact, once we go this far, we’re pretty well talking about Google’s PageRank search algorithm (and therefore, in a way, the entire web): you get what you put into it, link and be linked to…
This might seem pretty familiar, but sometimes we can change our whole way of looking at things and discover bold new opportunities right under our noses just by re-articulating the ideas we take for granted (or assume we understand because we can kinda feel and practice them every day). It certainly doesn’t answer all the questions (or any questions, for that matter), but we’ve got to explore all these heuristic avenues.
Overcoming yesterday’s models isn’t enough. The wider/deeper background in which those models were conceived needs to be updated, and that evolution is a slower process that involves looking around a lot of dead-end corners and sleeping on a lot of zany half-joking ideas.
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