Will Content Discovery Make way for Product Discovery Engines?

It wasn’t more than a year back that I wrote people come online for information. That that’s why Google, social networks and social bookmarks are popular because they constant feed people with information. Content discovery tools to me where the biggest asset of the Internet and the biggest bet to money on it.

However, of late I am beginning to change this view. I tend to think these days that the search engine of the future and social networks of the future will drive product discovery and not just content. That people will use the web to identify, buy and further reccomend products than just use the web for more information about it. That tools will collate, display and enable such a use better creating a cycle.

The dearth of Advertising that works

One of the primary reason is something I discussed last month about the way advertising is headed online. That it has to supplement the final mile of usage on the web.

Content discovery engines primarily banked on advertising for their revenues, still do. However, with third party banners and text links being a circumspect candidate for big money these tools will have to look beyond them. And we saw the first step towards this around a decade back from another unlikely name – Apple. I might have said this before but the iTunes ecosystem is perhaps the best model for a lot of online publishers to pursue. And it is because it brings together two different ends – Content and Commerce.

It won’t be plain commerce

It is not all about e-commerce again, that’s been tried, tested and still being unraveled, which means the way commerce happens on digital is still not strong as a model (yet). So like we saw in the case of Telegraph last week, commerce has to be mixed with content. Commerce in Media Post’s words has to become social as well perhaps.

Social Commerce

Here’s where the social media angle comes into play. What bookmrking tools and social networks did to the web was offer a whole different method of information reaching the users. With blogs and later microblogs content became more than just information, they sort of became brand vehichles often personal and sometimes corporate. People became their status messages and blog posts. It thus gave rise to content driven communities which are taking shape even now.

When this moves on to a web where content and commerce mix with each other, it gives rise to a different a more sophisticated (for lack of a better term) tribe. People will be the products they buy. Buying a product will b a reflection just like tweets and status updates are now. Now the product can be anything, even content. With iTunes it was music, with iPhone, Wave et al it will be apps, with Mudrochish folks it will be news, with Threadless it will be Tees.

On a broader note, if the past couple of years went in engaging and enabling your users enough to make them talk about you positively, the future will want you to make them sell your products. Content will still be a major fator, that is what will find your way to your customers. However unlike now where it is the last stop of online efforts, we will see that it is the first point of entry – the first handshake perhaps.

Brands therefore will need to converge being a media and being on a medium together. Publishers will need to facilitate this for brands and thus become product discovery tools for customers.

Net-a-Porter is doing this. ThisNext is doing this. Thesixtyone is doing this. Gracenote is doing this already. And now that many of us are talking about the future of social web a lot more are likely to follow.