Upendra Shardanand

Fred Destin was kind enough to notice Daylife’s quiet, steady growth (“A content network to rule them all”). Building businesses takes time!

Fred perceives a key aspect of a content network like Daylife: the super-distribution of content, and the audience it brings. Or put another way, increasing the economic utility of content. If a piece of content is used in more places, more easily, then its value increases and it’s easier to financially rationalize its creation.

Now, for Daylife or any other content network to make a dent in the economics of original content creation will require Google-esque scale, and likely a value-capture model richer than just “driving traffic.” Not quite there yet.

The more immediate and interesting economic angle, which we’ve got today (and which is pointed out in the comments to Fred’s post by Shaqfat of the promising newscred.com),  is giving publishers a way to scale and support their original content creation.

Consider that Daylife.com is showing some great growth with zero marketing (or perhaps even negative marketing – we haven’t even gotten around to basics like e-mail to a friend, RSS, etc.) and no dedicated staff (the only human intervention is programming the large cover images on our front page).

Now, imagine you were a publisher with a brand, a decent page rank, an editorial staff, and your own voice.  You can now mix in the Daylife API and create your own site or application, adding millions of pages that run automagically.

All those additional pages generate additional engagement, ad inventory, and $, allowing the publisher to underwrite their original content creation. (Which, as I argued, is more important than ever in this day and age).

The model is shifting towards a core of original content creation and human voice, robocop’d with automation to not only create new experiences but generate additional scale.

And in time the content networks will achieve scale, and the original content (the best of it, at least) will see increasing utility, as Fred forecasts.