Week 10: Lightweights and Scalables

Our final Web 2.0 pattern is Lightweight Models and Cost-Effective Scalability.  A sort of amalgamation of all previous patterns, Lightweight Models and Cost-Effective Scalability means cheap, re-usable, easy to upgrade web-based solutions or services.  The service must be cheap to implement and easy to access (lightweight) and must be easy to modify and upgrade in the future (cost-effective scalability).  The ultimate goal is to get the products released sooner and cheaper, without sacrificing future growth or improvement.  We can start making money as soon as possible, start getting feedback as soon as possible, and begin upgrading and fixing the service after release.

This pattern is represented in almost all Web 2.0 applications.  It therefore makes it very difficult to pick one example to serve as a better example than any other.  So for the third and final time, we're going to talk about YouTube.

YouTube is a framework: a bare bones service that allows users to share, search, and view, and monetize their own content.  The greatest cost the YouTube has to bear is the cost of the servers required to store all that video, but YouTube can make that all back (and much more) simply by displaying advertisements on video pages.

YouTube doesn't have to pay for any of the actual content.  The cost of producing videos is born by the content creators.  YouTube's own marketing was almost entirely viral, and didn't cost YouTube a cent.  People started using it and telling each other about how great it was.

So, YouTube simply hosts content.  It doesn't pay for content, it doesn't pay for marketing, and it makes a boatload of cash with advertisements.

Week 9: Leveraging the Long Tail

Our Web 2.0 pattern for the week is "Leveraging the Long Tail".  The "Long Tail" is the large number of small niche successes that are increasingly making up the bulk of most products and services, and is distinct from the "Head", the comparatively small number of mass-market products.

"Leverage" is an over-used and under-defined business term that can be taken here to mean "finding success in", or "monetising".  So we must talk about a service that allows people to find success in The Long Tail, and what better example than our old friend YouTube?

Yes! YouTube, service for the sharing and distribution (and monetisation!) of video content.  YouTube may be the perfect example, since anybody can upload videos, and the people who actually want to watch those kinds of videos will be be able to find them easily enough with YouTube's already pretty stellar search functionality.

The popularity of it's videos and channels matches perfectly the graph given above.  You have a few channels that most people watch, but most channels only a few people watch.  Different channels and users are able to provide whatever content they want to provide, and the people who come to watch are watching only the videos that they want to watch.

Finally, YouTube allows you to monetise your channel!  This means that anybody with a YouTube partnership is allowed to gain advertisement revenue from people watching their content.  It's true that you require a large number of viewers to guarantee a large income, but nevertheless it remains true that those in The Long Tail can experience some monetary reward for their hard work.