Joost - Among the living dead
By Daniel, July 1st, 2009As Joost has announced a number of changes including the stepping down of CEO Mike Volpi and changing its strategy to focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, it could be worth thinking about what went wrong.
Om Malik at gigaom.com provides a good analysis. The key thing that Om and many others point at is lack of good content which is something I fully second. Many also claim that going for an application rather than web browser was a key mistake, but I think a bigger problem was that they weren’t able to capitalize on the potential benefits of an appplication in providing a superior user experience. The user experience of Joost was not very good and included technical problems as well as difficulties finding even the good content that was there. As we have seen with Spotify, it is actually possible to create viral growth of a consumer-facing application if you provide tools for spreading (such as collaborative playlists and embedded playlists) as well as a great user experience.
July 1st, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Daniel, I actually think that Spotify has some way to go and could improve the viral growht substantially if you embraced the development community further. A wrote a post about it a while ago, would like to hear your thougts on that: http://emerging101.com/2009/05/spotify-missar-virala-mojligheter/
July 1st, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Thanks for the interesting post Johan!
I totally agree that Spotify could probably do much more. My point was not to say that Spotify doesn’t have some way to go, rather to provide an example (close at hand obviously) of an application that has managed to grow virally. It was supposed to be read in context of comments about Joost failing to grow virally due to the choice of application rather than web browser. Even so, I think you are right that choosing proprietary technology (as e.g. the Spotify application) versus open standards gives you a disadvantage in terms of getting additional developers on board. And back to the original point, it can be achieved also with applications as seen with the open source of downloadable software.