The Platform Business Model - The Bits Hive Needs

@taskmaster4450 published a very thought-provoking piece earlier - you can see it at https://inleo.io/@taskmaster4450/web-30-key-adopting-the-platform-business-model

While I agree with a lot of it's points, I felt there are some additional ingredients. It's kind of inevitable when you try to boil such a complex subject down to a single post !

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The two most important things I feel we need within Hive are;

Linking It All Together

Taskmaster identifies that the success of Web2 sites is down to using a platform business model. It's where the functionality starts off with a simple easily understood single concept, and then grows over time with the user base, adding more and more useful tools as time goes on, and monetising them.

The Web2 Way

In a Web2 site, let's say Facebook, you want to make a post - you do it from a single control panel. You want to go into a group and chat a bit more privately - you'll find a list of your groups on the left. You want to advertise something on Facebook Marketplace - it's top right. From anywhere, hit the icon top left and go to your Homepage that shows you everything.

The Web3 Problem

Well, Hive has a huge number of tools already. Yes, there are gaps (a good alternative to Discord is my pet bugbear !), but it's already a massive ecosystem. Where we fail compared to Web2 platforms is how the ecosystem is accessed.

You want to make a post ? Sure, go to the website of whichever frontend you like. Want to play with Tribe tokens ? Yep, go to the website of Beeswap, Tribaldex, or whatever. Want to post or watch videos ? Go to 3Speak.

See the problem ? It's all separate disjointed websites. They're individually great, but there's nothing linking them together in a single navigation. Right now, I've got tabs open for InLeo, PeakD, Ecency and Beeswap, because each one has something I do regularly that they handle really well.

An Idea For A Solution

The problem is, that variety of different ways of accessing each piece of functionality is part of the strength of Web3 and it's resilience. If we just push people to use specific interfaces it defeats that as well as stunting the opportunity for new projects to deliver something amazing because it's overshadowed by "whatever was launched first".

But I hate to point out a problem without trying to come up with a solution. I'm not sure it's the best answer (if there's a better one, please, please tell me !), and I'm not a developer so I don't know if it's even practical, but here goes....

How about someone with more talent than me develops a kind of "blank" interface, with spaces for the most commonly needed functionality into which could be dropped links and icons for the bits of the ecosystem you use the most. For example, you might have a box where you'd put your most preferred two or three front ends, initially selected from a small drop-down menu which shows all the ones we know about (which then turns itself into a little button saying "more...". There would be boxes all over for different types of functionality, as well as ones you could give your own title and add links for less commonly-used things. Ideally, you'd be able to move these boxes around into whatever configuration works best for you.

Doing this would hopefully create an interface which brings all the different bits of functionality together into a Hive Home Page that's customisable by each user and also (through the dropdowns) acts as a directory of all the projects within the Hive ecosystem. With any luck, it would also help exciting new projects get some exposure.

Show Me The Money

The other thing we need to do is get money into Web3. Serious money, not just a few of us buying HIVE tokens every few months. Hive's market cap is still pretty decent at around £137,000,000 but it's only position 366 on CoinGecko's list, down about 150 places compared to this time last year. We need to be in the top 50, and with real money not the speculative price growth that has pushed some other coins upwards.

The Web2 Solution

The way Web2 solved this was by attracting money from businesses. Lots of businesses.

Here's an example. Instead of following the traditional pre-Web method (exemplified by TV advertising) of attracting a few advertisers with budgets of millions, Google Adwords led the way by attracting businesses with budgets of a few tens to a couple of thousand dollars a month and then providing the tools for them to manage their own advertising on the platform.

The key was a complex blend of having a place where the consumers were at, and being able to charge businesses a low enough amount individually that they could see a return on their investment.

I own a micro business, and don't mind spending a couple of hundred pounds to test out a form of advertising to see if it works. But I won't do what some old-school suppliers try to push of signing up to a 12-month contract for £500 a month plus £2000 setup cost if I don't know it's going to get me enough business to cover the cost. Web2 was brilliant at giving me ways to test things out without that level of commitment.

The Web3 Solution

Web3 can probably do even better, but so far really doesn't try to attract small business money.

The big way it scores is with transparency and the permanence of data stored on the blockchain.

Google and Facebook have grown a reputation for having advertising interfaces that have grown ridiculously over-complex, and for playing fast and loose with their billing (on YouTube, a default setting is that when you mouse over a video, it shows a preview; Google counts that as a "view" and bills advertisers accordingly...)

So with Web3, we have all kinds of opportunities to attract small and medium business money. Not just for advertising (I'm well aware of consumer aversion to "push" advertising - I think Brave are headed in the right direction on that), but for games, crypto payment processing, utilities, data storage and a whole host of other things.

The key here will be building robust and user-friendly tools, then making the offer good enough that it becomes a natural thing for businesses to want to spend their money with us. We don't want to have to give all our money back to Web2 companies to advertise what we've built !

So what do you think ? It's a complex subject with a lot of interlocking parts, but am I on the right track here, or do you think I'm crazy ? 😀

Posted Using InLeo Alpha