(NOTE: The business plan for OpportuniTV.com is the basis of this site. The text of Steps 1-7 is excerpted from the plan. Throughout, OpportuniTV.com is abbreviated as OppTV.)
| "As Argentina’s economy falters, millions turn to a booming bartering system to make do. Customers can trade for goods or buy them with paper that looks like Monopoly money, called creditos."
St. Petersburg Times |
The first market that OppTV will introduce is a price-transparent [1] online market for buying and selling ad spaces on single-creator media (e.g., blogs maintained by subject-matter experts). OppTV will also introduce a barter currency [2] for use at the market. This novel combination will provide people with improved ways to profit from their expertise, because:
| "With audiences growing at double- or triple-digit rates, ad prices are soaring for top blogs."
San Francisco Chronicle |
- an expert who acquires ad space at OppTV’s market to advertise his media will receive (more) offers of good jobs (assuming he wants offers)
- an expert whose media earns a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OppTV’s currency will attract ad-space buyers who pay with cash
An expert who acquires ad space at OppTV’s market to advertise his media will receive (more) offers of good jobs, because:
| “Millions of professionals already turn to broad-based networking sites like LinkedIn to swap job details and contact information, often for recruiting purposes.”
Wall Street Journal |
An expert who advertises his media this way will gain an expanded network of professional contacts, and a high and/or fast-rising ad rate for his media in OppTV’s currency (details below).
A high percentage of jobs are found through professional contacts (the Wall Street Journal cites estimates as high as 95%) [3].
An ad rate in OppTV’s currency will be predictive of the recipient’s job performance (details below).
The more important (i.e., good) the job, the more an employer will value additional predictive information about a prospective hire.
An expert who acquires ad space at OppTV’s market to advertise his media will gain an expanded network of professional contacts, because:
Media created by an expert will be frequented by the expert’s competitors (e.g., peers who want to benchmark their competitiveness).
An expert who acquires ad space on media created by a person with complementary expertise (hereafter a complementor), then, will get the attention of a number of complementors.
The complementors who view the expert’s ad will typically sample the expert’s media, because, again, a high percentage of jobs are found through professional contacts.
The expert’s media will make it clear to his complementors that the expert has complementary expertise (i.e., the media will substantiate claims made in the expert’s ad).
The expert’s media will make it easy for complementors to introduce themselves to the expert (e.g., the expert’s media will show the expert’s email address, the expert’s blog will accept reader comments).
An expert who acquires ad space at OppTV’s market to advertise his media will gain a high and/or fast-rising ad rate for his media in OppTV’s currency, because:
Again, complementors who are exposed to the expert’s advertising will typically seek a professional relationship with the expert.
Experts will be particularly attentive to (potential) repeat buyers of their ad space –- the more of OppTV’s currency the expert earns from sales of his ad space, after all, the more advertising he can do.
Complementors with sufficient funds (e.g., in OppTV’s currency), then, will buy ad space on the expert’s media.
Generally speaking, the more competent the individual, the more valuable he is as a professional contact – hence, there will be a lot of demand for the expert’s ad space.
An ad rate in OppTV’s currency will be predictive of the recipient’s job performance, because:
At any given time, ad-space buyers will have only a finite amount of OppTV’s currency.
As such, ad-space buyers will take pains to spend wisely.
An ad rate in OppTV’s currency, then, will largely equate to complementors’ ratings of the recipient’s expertise.
Ratings by complementors are very predictive of the recipient’s job performance (.49 correlation; the best predictor of job performance has a .54 correlation) [4].
All told, the aforesaid way of cultivating job opportunities is much better for experts than popular online destinations for professional networking like LinkedIn.com or Facebook.com [5], which provide no mechanism for generating accurate ratings from complementors (i.e., no rating mechanism that is not easily gamed).
An expert whose media earns a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OppTV’s currency will attract ad-space buyers who pay with cash, because:
| “The good news is that there are people in the world who can analyze and optimize a mix of media. The bad news, experts say? The total number in the world qualified and able to do so is in the hundreds – at the most.
…To find a marketing person with the right skill set to do analytics can take nine months. …So where do you find them?…No one’s figured out a good way to [recruit analytics-savvy] marketers. ‘I don’t know that we’ve figured it out, so we’re trying to throw the net broad,’ Harrah’s Mr. Norton says… The [hiring] process is inefficient and is likely to remain so for now.” Advertising Age |
Advertising agencies are desperate to identify and hire people who know how to spend wisely on online ad spaces [6].
People can demonstrate this aptitude in OppTV’s barter market by buying undervalued ad space and selling it for a profit (these buyers are hereafter referred to as traders).
As is shown below, OppTV is optimized to attract traders to its ad-space market.
It is likely that many people will become traders [7].
Traders who parlay their success into media-planning/-buying jobs will bring their clients’ money to OppTV’s ad-space market, because advertisers are buying ad space on single-creator media [8], and are expected to spend much more on such ad space in the future [9].
These media planners/buyers will seek out bargains in OppTV’s barter market (i.e., they will seek out desirable ad spaces that haven’t yet attracted cash buyers).
As seen above, traders have a lot to gain from amassing a track record of profitable trades.
In particular, traders will gain by buying ad spaces in OppTV’s currency that they subsequently sell to media buyers for cash.
As such, traders will bid up the rates in OppTV’s currency of ad spaces that they believe are worthy of attracting cash bids.
High and/or fast-rising ad rates in OppTV’s currency, then, will provide media planners/buyers with good indicators of how they can spend their cash wisely. (Of course, complementors’ ratings will also be reflected in these ad rates, but complementors’ ratings are entirely – wait for it
– complementary to traders’ ratings for the purpose of identifying quality single-creator media).
As experts come to understand the benefits of creating media that earns a high ad rate, they will seek out (more) ways to demonstrate their comparative expertise to (prospective) audiences. To facilitate these demonstrations, OppTV will introduce new online markets for making predictions. Companies like Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Yahoo! use prediction markets to aid corporate forecasting and decision making [10]. Rankings in OppTV’s prediction markets will make it easy for audiences to find media created by comparative experts (particularly when audiences utilize ad-rate rankings along with prediction-market rankings).
| “’There has been a huge swing to custom programmes,’ says Fiona van Haeringen of IESE, who attended a recent annual conference of business-education providers in America…Looking to this year, most saw growth coming mainly from customised education.”
The Economist |
OppTV will also introduce a “workflow” market for customized education (CE). The advent of this market will DRAMATICALLY improve the way people develop expertise [11], and will provide a new way for experts to monetize expertise. A workflow market facilitates the provisioning of customized, just-in-time supply chains.
| “[In his book The World Is Flat, author] Thomas Friedman identified three primary periods of globalization…Today we have arrived at the third era…the emergence of the flat world…Friedman identified a third, less visible driver of the flattening world: workflow software. These software programs allow individuals to collaborate on projects anywhere in the world.”
Competing In A Flat World |
Participants in OppTV’s prediction and ad-space markets will catalyze the use of OppTV’s CE market, because:
Consumers of CE need to feel confident that they are receiving value for their expenditures. As such, they need high-quality, up-to-date information about:
- career opportunities
- proven and novel ways to enter these fields, and to advance thereafter
- quality suppliers of CE (e.g., teachers, curriculum (co-)designers)
Put differently, CE consumers need:
- a large number of accomplished/ascendant professionals to:
- share detailed information about their education, professional accomplishments and other demonstrations of expertise (e.g., a high ad rate in barter currency, high rankings in prediction markets)
- keep this information current
- a smaller – but still large – number of analysts to process this information regularly/continually, and to share their analyses
The prospect of earning a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OppTV’s currency (thereby attracting more offers of good jobs, and attracting cash-paying advertisers), will motivate information-sharers and analysts (details below). Complementors’ ratings generated at OppTV’s market (i.e., ad rates in OppTV’s currency) will provide analysts with reliable indicators of individuals’ comparative expertise (e.g., the expertise of CE suppliers), as will rankings in OppTV’s prediction markets.
The prospect of earning a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OppTV’s currency will motivate information-sharers, because:
As seen above, a key to achieving a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OppTV’s currency is impressing complementors and traders. A key to impressing complementors and traders is sharing detailed, up-to-date information about one’s education, professional accomplishments and other demonstrations of expertise.
The prospect of earning a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in OppTV’s currency will motivate analysts, because:
Analysts will be able to:
- aggregate the information provided by many accomplished/ascendant professionals who seek to impress complementors as described above
- analyze the information (e.g., calculate statistics)
- create media that presents the results from their ongoing analyses
- barter and/or sell the ad space on this media
In particular, analysts will be able to create media that provides high-quality, up-to-date information about:
- career opportunities
- proven and novel ways to enter these fields, and to advance thereafter
- quality CE suppliers (e.g., teachers, curriculum (co-)designers, career counselors)
This media will be popular with the young and upwardly mobile, who are the favorite audience of cash-paying advertisers [12].
In time, OppTV will offer a generalized version of the workflow market for CE. The generalized market will provide people with an improved way to monetize expertise related to any kind of work (i.e., not just to teaching).
