Lists & Discovery

Discovery is the holy grail of monetization. It's so potentially valuable, but until now has proved impossibly elusive.

The main way sites and services are able to monetize their concerns today is by selling the intent of their users. When you search for CryptoKitties or porn or an umbrella or whatever online, you are signaling direct intent about those things.

Those things can then be paired with an ad or featured site of a more or less similar nature. And the advertisers behind the ad as well as site operator who was featured pay for that intent. The theory behind that assumes that you will continue to be interested in what you signaled interest in.

That's more or less true for some things, but not everything. Hence, the stupid banner ads showing you teaspoons for 7 weeks after you buy what will in all likelihood be your first and last teaspoon while you're alive.

What would be ideal, or so the ad men and women tell us, is if the ads could show you something that you'd like without you even knowing you'd like that thing ahead of time (i.e. showing you something you may like without using previously signaled intent).

Our intent-based search approach has yielded probably trillions of sites, apps, pictures, podcasts, newsletters and more that are incredibly specific, focused and niche. And basically a few algorithms (e.g. Google and Facebook) are determining what of that ocean of information is ever shown to us.

So we miss a lot and forget a lot.

On Cent I have a weekly BOTI bounty where I attach a modest bounty and call upon my fellow Centians to share the best (i.e. funniest, most important, or thought provoking) articles, podcasts, Tweets, Grams, Youtube videos, apps, Dapps or whatever from the internet last week. The user submissions are then ranked based on an army of Centians who iteratively compare pair sets of submissions and select what they think is the best.

If 100s or 1000s of users that are from all over the world representing as varied and diverse a population as can be imagined all progressively rank and choose information optimizing for the "best", that's no different than getting 100s or 1000s of algorithms to interoperate together for the same purpose.

And despite what is now a relatively low incentive of around $5, the resulting BOTI lists have been delightfully great! What's more, several other users repeatedly expressed their delight and thanks for being provided a list that contains many great things that they'd never have been able to discover previously.

Fuck. Doesn't that just say it all?

Pretty soon I can foresee a Best of List for every major platform and aggregator, from Facebook and Instagram, to Twitter and Snap and everything else on a daily basis with way higher bounties. Moreover, it's my feeling that the value these lists produce (in terms of discovery and utility to say nothing of the delight and joy) will be monetizable to a degree that now is simply unimaginable. The key difference will be that the value will be captured mainly by the content creators, sharers, and curators with the platform host receiving a small share.

As forecast, the future will be a constant battle for and of the algorithms, but it will be for the human algorithms that make up that perfectly diverse unique blend of quality sorters that will be able to reliably produce lists that provide immense discovery value and the algorithms that are used to determine that perfect mix.

This has been a bit of a ramble, and there is a ton that needs to be fleshed out, let alone tested, but this has got me pretty damn excited. Now I just need to get a few others to see what I see. Happy weekend everybody.