By background I’m a writer so when I look at business models I tend to orient towards content. However, as Jeff Jarvis points out in his interesting but flawed book, What Would Google Do?, virtually all successful tech companies are platforms, not content producers.

Content does not scale well

Content, whether it’s writing, video, audio (I refuse to use the word ‘podcast’ because I’ve always thought it was a dumb word for an audio recording), animation, photos, etc., is labor intensive and requires a lot of creative and production time. It simply does not scale well, and because of that the potential for profits is very limited. That’s why the various blog publisher networks have limited growth potential.

Platforms have a virtually unlimited potential upside

Platforms, on the other hand, are the opposite. By building a place for anyone to add their own content, a platform developer automates the content issue via crowdsourcing. So what is a platform? Any kind of content management system (CMS) that makes it easy for anyone to publish their content is a platform. Any online system that helps people manage their data, without programming skills, is a platform. Salesforce, WordPress, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn- they’re all platforms, very successful ones.

Platforms are not just for the big guys: Wetpaint

This struck me because I’ve been using a platform called Wetpaint to build out a community site about the many waterfront neighborhoods here in Rochester, NY. Wetpaint allows me to be in both the content business and the platform business, albeit on a small scale. It is a wiki platform with many attributes of a data-driven web site and requires no programming, although you can get in to edit style sheets and a lot more (which we are doing). I’m populating the site with the basic content, descriptions of the neighborhoods, maps, photos, etc. Once it’s got the basics, I’ll launch it. That’s where it turns into a platform that I now own.

Crowdsourcing the content

Wetpaint’s wiki features mean that others can now add content, in this case moderated by my group. They can write about their neighborhood, post event info, photos, video, participate in forums and more. It’s my hope that I’ll find advocates in each neighborhood who become editors of their area’s content. The revenue model is local advertising and lead generation for real estate companies.

Wetpaint’s design is very easy to configure and use for a non-programmer like myself. There is a free version I’m using while I set it up that has ads on it and sits on their URL. For a small monthly fee I can move it to my URL and eliminate their ads.

Building a business with zero investment

This is an almost perfect example of how social media and web 2.0 has moved into the mainstream. As little as three years ago I would have had to assemble a team of programmers and designers to build a database-driven platform for this site. Those costs would have made it difficult to justify as a local project. Now, I can get a small business up and running for virtually nothing beyond my own work creating the content and promoting the site.

Pretty cool.