Content or Community? Both?

After considering the actual format of today's top websites like youtube.com, travelocity, weather channel, and many others like twitter, and even google which used to be only a content web site, nowadays allow us to have communities through some tools like Blogger and Gmail chat so people can keep in touch with some others.

It seems that some kind of trend have been imposing this mixture within popular web sites trying to keep as complete as possible so the users can find everything they would like and even more in one website. However, isn't it kind of over saturating already that every and each one of the websites nowadays want to create communities and include content? How many of us already belong to more than three different web communities? How many of them do we really follow on a daily basis?

We can take a look to the example of travelocity which is a travel booking web site and used to be basically a content web page, and nowadays people sign in to make comments and read some others about personal experiences, is it really important for us to compare our experiences with the others', or is it really more important for that company to have a lot of people making good comments about their vacations and travels in order to encourage other potential customers to book their next vacations with them... but does it really means that there are not customers with bad feedback out there? Isn't it some kind of a manipulated advertisement? How do we know they are not covering those negative posts and highlighting the positives?

In the end, how important is it that our favorite web sites include content and community format in order to keep us logged on more time, or to attract new users from our contacts and relatives?

Whatever the content is... at least for me.. each web site has its main function, so when I want to search for some content I'll look for content web sites, and when it comes down to communities and sharing with contacts I'll keep my browser in places such as Facebook and everything seems more easy for me that way.

Show me the Money!... I'll show you the news!

Whether important media providers such as the New York Times or other not that much recognized decide to charge the users of their online sites in order to access to the "quality" news they provide, will not limit the online users to get access to the information for free. It is well known by all of us, users of media, that what gives this kind of major journals their strength and importance in the market is the amount of readers that prefer them rather than some minor competitors.

However, it is a trend in the whole media industry to provide information services for free, as we can see in the newspaper industry, everyday more companies decide to circulate them for free, and of course advertising companies prefer those since are often the ones with more circulation among the population.

Given this, the users will find new alternate sources to stay informed without having to pay any kind of memberships or access fees. However this doesn't necessary infers that only the richest part of our society will have access to those online news sites, since the amount to be charged is not necessarily too much for some other social classes which are willing to spend some of their budgets to acquire "high-quality" information.

But without any doubt, the total number of readers in these major media online sites will experience a huge drop, probably resulting in the lost of interest for the advertisers, resulting this in a big revenue loss for those companies. Probably looking at this from a same approach some of those major online news sites will not even discuss the possibility of charging us to get access to their news.

why e-marketing?

Several years ago most of the industries leaders were really hesitating about taking their businesses to the web and offering their customers the option of buying online their products or services. Mostly this doubt were coming from the conservative point of view that the internet may only be some sort of trend or probably too complicated for the end users of their products, so they would still prefer the old conventional sales channels.

Therefor only the most risky companies dared to entry the online industry to display their virtual shelf for the customers. After doing this many other companies followed the model and realized that by implementing e-marketing they could be able to reduce some costs from the value chain of each product. In some cases it has even been possible to eliminate some intermediaries from the distribution channel in which some wholesalers and manufacturers can offer their products directly to the end user.

After reviewing this advantages, e-marketing can be very helpful for both parts, either the seller and the buyer, since it allows to find the right product easier and at the same time save some money for both parts. Its because of these advantages that the online shelf has become nowadays the new marketplace and battlefield for the industries leaders.