Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
149
 www.ideavirus.com
This is a lesson in one way to make your digital media valuable: keep it fresh. It’s getting
harder and harder to do; they used to send Charles Dickens’ serialized novels over here by
boat—news that was three weeks old was considered fresh—but that doesn’t mean you can’t
succeed.
By focusing on souvenirs and speed, creators of digital media can create two effective ways to
profit when we play by the coming new set of rules.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
150
 www.ideavirus.com
Answering Ina’s Question
So how is a bookstore to make money? Or a publisher? Or an art dealer or a consultant or a
music label?
The biggest objection to ideavirus thinking is that it represents a substantial change from
standard operating procedures. Successful companies are in no hurry to rock the boat…
especially if it represents a significant change in the status quo and a risk to planned-for
revenue and profits.
Mighty Words (an Internet articles publisher) is aggressively targeting traditional book
publishers and re-sellers by creating a new online business that cuts out all the middlemen
and lets authors sell works (preferably 15 to 60 pages) directly to readers. Go to their site and
you can find thousands of articles, priced from $3 to $30 each.
Mighty Words gets half the revenue, the author gets half, the reader gets insight and wisdom
and everybody wins. By creating new markets for mid-length ideas, the company seems to be
filling a niche. Of course, then they can turn their success into dominance by integrating up
the food chain until they disrupt all the competition in the publishing world and profit
mightily.
So you’d think that the concept of ideaviruses would be attractive to this maverick company.
After all, they’re only a few months old.
Not true. It bugs them terribly to give away ideas, because it flies in the face of their brand
new business model. After all, if an author profits most by giving away her work, how does
Mighty Words make money?
If you catch yourself asking this question about a new business model innovation (“How
would we make money?”) you’re headed for trouble. The Internet doesn’t care how you
make money. The Internet isn’t going to wait while you figure out how to react. Instead,
there’s some crazy entrepreneur who’s willing to spend years of his life making you miserable
by wrecking your business model.

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