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Just because it’s useful, needed or worthwhile doesn’t mean it’s a good business. E-bikes are transforming cities and offering mobility to those who previously couldn’t afford it. But they’re a commodity, and it’s difficult to make a significant profit producing them. A good business meets a demand,...

Every internet success works because the network effect kicked in. There’s no other way for an idea to reliably and economically reach a big enough audience to be sustained. That’s why Super Bowl ads make so little sense in 2024. Ideas that spread win. I wrote a bestseller about this 20 years ago, a...

We actually don’t really know. Netflix just released their first-ever detailed analysis of how many hours of engagement the top 15,000+ most watched shows on the network received over a six month period. Here’s the file. Who won? That question is actually the lesson here. The fact is, most organizat...

Lana Swartz coined this term in her breakthrough paper on crypto. A scam always involves a transaction. In the traditional fraud, the scammer tells a lie and the buyer, either with or without diligence, believes it and loses everything. You buy the magic beans, but they don’t grow. But modern scams ...

There are now 1,000 of us in this online community that’s not a social network. Proudly a millionth the size of some other online experiences. It includes the original Creative’s Workshop, with hundreds of people working through it, side by side. And just added, access to the Marketing Seminar. But ...

Adults make choices and live with the consequences. No one else should tell us what flavor of ice cream we prefer, or what career to choose. We’re good at knowing what we want. In practice, this works really well for certain kinds of decisions. But when we add the network effect, profit-seeking indu...

More than ever, we’re pushed to have certainty. Strong opinions, tightly held and loudly proclaimed. And then, when reality intervenes, it can be stressful. The software stack, business model, career, candidate, policy, or even the social network habits that we had as part of our identity let us dow...

If you’ve borrowed money or sold shares, you’ll need to build something that’s worth more than your labor. Here are some key pillars where value lives: Customer tractionPermissionDistributionThe network effectSmallest viable audience Customer traction is the big one. Every day, are there more people...

Entrenched cultural organizations and icons feel more permanent than they are. Network effects, brand power and the status quo can seduce us into believing that we’re stuck with what we have, but things are rarely as permanent as they appear. James Bond is bloated and dated. Idris Elba deserves the ...

It is, by far, the fastest-growing social network in history, growing more than 20% in about a week. And yet it didn’t stutter much. How can this be? It’s a network in the real internet…

It is, by far, the fastest-growing social network in history, growing more than 20% in about a week. And yet it didn’t stutter much. How can this be? It’s a network in the real internet sense of the word. It’s not just a network of users, it’s a network of servers as well. No one […]      

Your house contains products from hundreds of thousands of suppliers and craftspeople. The food you eat comes to you from a very loosely coordinated (not organized, not controlled) network of millions of vendors and farmers. To read this blog, you’re using software from hundreds (probably thousands)...

Moore’s law talks about the fact that computer chips get faster and cheaper over time. It turns out that the biggest shift to our culture isn’t the changing speed of a computer chip, it’s what happens when we network humans together. Adding more people to the internet has accelerated science, politi...

We’re looking for some volunteers to join us. It’s life-changing, useful, powerful work. After taking our Almanac to #1 in the US, Italy and the Netherlands, the volunteers on this project are working to amplify our message. We connect online, from countries around the world, and we’ve built an actu...

Books used to be a solitary endeavor. Ironically, it took the network effect and noise of the web to flip that idea upside down. Now, a book is a totem, a chance to share, an item to be discussed, a physical instantiation of an idea that can be drawn on, exchanged or simply sit on […]      

It is found or it arrives. It is hosted many places or it has a single home. It earns and delivers on permission, or it’s spam. It changes over time or it’s static. It’s the work of an individual or the production of a community. It’s valuable because of network effects, or in spite of […]      

To make an album of music good enough to make it to the Top 40, it used to cost a million dollars. Now you can do it in your bedroom. To make a commercial for network TV, a minute of footage cost a…

The gulf between network news of 1968 and cable news of today is dramatic, far more than the shift in, say, a typical sitcom. The Dick Van Dyke show is quaint, but it has a lot in common with a sit…

Publishers take two risks to bring new ideas to the world. (And I’m talking about any middleperson–a gallerist, a TV network, a movie studio, a label–they’re all publishers)…

First: If you come up with an innovation that creates value, that value is multiplied a million-fold because now you can share it outside your village. Second: If you build a community, the network…

Old-fashioned monopolies rely on some sort of coercion. Perhaps you need to bribe FCC commissioners to avoid net neutrality, or simply influence a local board to permit you to, by law, be the only …

For a very long time, major magazines and TV networks were very strict about the ads that they would run. The format, content and impact of an ad had to be approved before it showed up on network T…

With enough top-down energy, it feels like the creator of an idea can broadcast it, anytime and anywhere. That enough hype/promo/media/leverage ought to allow a major publisher or network or candid…

If you share a pizza with a large crowd, no one will be very satisfied. But if you share an idea with a group, it creates cultural impact and becomes more valuable as it spreads, not less. Most of …

The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…

The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…