Is it time for the consumer to compromise a little bit?
Okay, so we’ve known for some time that in online media the consumer is king. But is it just me or are consumers starting to demand a little bit too much? Is it starting to get a bit out of hand?
I love the clip below of Louis CK on how ‘Everything’s amazing and nobody is happy.’ I might just buy the T-Shirt.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itn8TwFCO4M&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
It’s funny ‘cos it’s true – people are demanding a lot of technology companies. As Louis says in the clip, ‘how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago.’
Now think of some of the demands being made on leading tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. We want amazing stuff, at low cost, often free, and we don’t want ads on it, and we want our privacy protected, and if there’s any other business models you can think of outside of that, we don’t want you doing any of those either. Phew, tough times.
The onus is definitely on digital businesses to forge new and creative ways to monetise their products and services. I’m all for that. But I’m also sensing the start of a slight shift in emphasis. If we as consumers want all this cool stuff, maybe we’re going to have to compromise a little bit more too, whether it’s paying for valuable content or allowing our private information to be used by businesses for commercial ends.
Hopefully businesses and consumers can meet somewhere in the middle, where tremendous value is created for both.