The Web’s Darwinism - Communitainment OR the ‘portal’ is dead, R.I.P.

Communitainment is the merging of communication, community, and entertainment,with consumers extending communication from an exchange of information to an exchange of content and entertainment within a community environment (i.e. FaceBook, MySpaceTV, etc).

Old media is terrible at knowing who is looking at what, let alone who is paying attention. On the internet you can know everything about your users. You can follow their clicks, their attention, where they scrub through video, their neighborhood, what kind of computer they have, who their friends are, etc. The traditional TV networks do not understand this.

Network TV as it is today wants us to remember their show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. What they are missing is that they have a chance to have a relationship with the audience. But old media TV networks don't want a relationship. They want us all to gather as family and sit and watch TV. Sounds like 1970 calling to me.

Providing news or entertainment is now a commodity, and successful destinations need to go well beyond this, looking into the needs of the modern Internet users. The “portal,” as we know it, is effectively dead. Users now do not need a single destination that provides every type of service or content with effective search tools; they can navigate to best-of-breed destinations and tools. The successful destinations of the next ten years will be agile and aggressive networks of smaller sites with specific applications that are highly tailored to user needs. With users becoming much more sophisticated, only the fittest will survive and Web Darwinism will play out over the next five years as the user revolution fully unfolds.

The Social nets have allowed millions to quickly congregate with others that have similar tastes and lifestyles. Communication about content, gossip, hobbies, and favorite things has allowed all of these people to connect with one another, even people they didn’t know but met online. The importance of this significant trend is this: all of these people spend considerable time online in these communities and less time watching traditional TV, reading newspapers and consuming ‘old’ media. Their habits are changing. And quickly.

The challenge is how to reach these people for advertisers. They need to adjust their thinking and look at reaching communities leveraging their brands and online communities. The importance of the communitainment trend is not just in shifting traffic patterns but, more importantly, in the way users view content as a free-flowing part of the communication spectrum. As such, many participants in communitainment view content such as music or video as an integral part of their experience and not as a distinct entity for which they have to pay and this is the REAL challenge.

The daily life of the average American is gradually changing, and the Internet is playing a major role in this change. The image of a parent sitting around the breakfast table reading the morning newspaper is obsolete, and the behavior of watching television is rapidly changing as the PC creeps into living room. The key trend here is not the increased amount of time spent on the Internet or even the broadening of the online demographic, but the fact that using the Internet is becoming a routine activity for most Americans.