Taste Making Domains
When website technology makes the cover of TIME magazine, the webmasters who skip taking note and continue on their geeky ride to stardom suffer. Collaborative filtering is what Netflix and Blockbuster have been doing for years with our movie choices. TIME’s article assumes that consumers and listeners are such spineless jellyfish their taste in music is a non-static dynamic one Pandoresque taffy pull away from new consumerism online.
Webmasters have seen this kind of taste making before, usually linked to consumer side reviews or specification linked technology elements. How you buy a computer online or how you buy an Ebay object show massive marketing heave in complementary response to every click. Vacuum cleaners and diapers get the same treatment from sites like Target.com and Kmart. Online consumers have learned to accept this collaborative response as a constant.
The owners and programmers of Pandora.com have a gleeful exuberance and gosh-gee-whiz exuberance of a winning website at the top of its game. Opening Pandora.com’s box would seem to be fun, I haven’t had the time nor the inclination. But to change up the model of the appeal of a Pandora business plan is a challenge all webmasters can relate to.
The domain is the brand, the starting point of a functional online destination. Creating a “Pandora” for computers and suggesting netbook or Ipad choices could also be the next big collaborative software requiring a recommendation engine. It could also be a shopping list item for domainers cruising the dollar domain threads or the dropping and deleting auction site lists.
Forming domain names to eventuate as Pandora-like portals for other consumer items or objects thus becomes a valid domaining goal. The name Pandora itself does not pertain to music or technology but rather to classical mythology. That the broad arc between those dynamics has been bridged shows the stamp of an impressive marketing campaign. The user clickthrough and site visit frequency ramps up the SEO value of any such site.
But what about the rest of us who haven’t chosen wannabe music fans as our target market? Lots of web surfers don’t want to be informed about their taste and neither do they want suggestions about what the webmasters think they are supposed to do or buy or click next. Generally these type of pointing fingers take the form of affiliate ads. YouTube and Tivo aren’t as sales oriented in the recommendation engine tactics so the pain isn’t felt as much.
The key market for Pandora would seem to be people too dumb or impatient to discover music for themselves. I guess if it doesn’t slay you in the first ten bars, you won’ t be tempted to buy it or know it or learn it. Pandora has transformed music appreciation into a game of “Name That Tune”, where consumers can turn thumbs down on any ditty they don’t cotton to.
Pandora.com has an intrinsic value in that it slyly siphons content from the corpus of music created worldwide across history. That is a very large target base of Internet browsers to tap. And they didn’t pay for the development. iTunes mined the same demographic, with its lead samplings and suggested additional tracks and artists.
The core value of a recommendation engine is its database of users. Pandora taps the musical tastes of users who have ranged through its site answering questions, scanning titles, and selecting artists. This type of data works through the filtering model and products likely pathways of additional similar choices. But the associative (SEO) model still works too.
It is hard to argue about the success and popularity of Pandora, but it confounds the logical webmaster in me to do it. FaceBook was just such a site, and now an industry of privacy and security software companies are making bank doling out protective code to people who give crib notes on their lives to people (Friends) they haven’t spoken to in decades.
The domain market contains many expansive opportunities for those with ideas and commitment to their collaborative projects. The domain model like Pandora.com as a suggestive filter or recommendation engine has merit. The broad range of objects this might apply to could start another domain gold rush in recommendation engine domains. Toys, books, kites, model airplanes, surfboards, a portal for anything can be created with such a model to work from.
Now that the public and online Internet user base has developed a taste for having their choices filtered back to them in the form of additional product or item suggestions, any domainer can identify their target object and build a ‘Pandora” of their own. There are no limits, from game playing software to Barbie clothing. The Web (and TIME Magazine) has spoken. If you build it, they will come.
