Personalisation, or P13N, if you will

Russ is talking about making money from customisation and personalisation (which I coined the term P13N for a few years back; turns out BEA already used it according to AcronymFinder: let’s co-opt it) from seemingly pointless bits of content:

I personally wonder how big it’ll be for mobile data services. My original assumption about ringtones was that it was the music people were interested in, but it looks like it may just be the customization and personalization.

Saw-You already have their Wee-Mee’s integrated with MSN Messenger in Europe, and I believe it will be available via network operators soon as well.

The charge for creating a Wee-Mee is anywhere between £1.50 and £6.00, which is as much as people charge for games. It’s a strange situation where people are paying as much for a piece of content which has negligible creativity behind it than for a game which has many man-months of effort into it.

There’s some weird market forces going on there that I need to get a handle on.

My take is that the market always pays for what the market wants, and what the market wants is self-expression. Whether that’s through avatars, wallpaper, ringtones, themes, cases, fascias or even signatures in message boards or email. Hell, Nokia have an entire series devoted to self-expression (the 3xxx series handsets), and Motorola’s latest ad campaign is called “My Moto”. These guys already understand that (the fact that Neowiz expect revenues of $65 million this year is further evidence of the opportunities here).

This sort of incremental content platform has been around in many guises, in many niche areas over the years, but it’s never been so prevalent and available as it is now.

And even better now that we’re all suitably digital, we can take this to the next level by applying the principles of mass customisation to content. Hint: “the assembly of a product or the rendering of a service from pre-configured modules or components.“