I’ve been doing research tied to the Web 2.0 (and it’s various buzzword predecessors) for the better part of the last decade. Throughout this time, I’ve been involved in regular and ongoing debates between two opposing points of view:

1. Context is King

2. Content is King

I’ve I go back far enough, I can recall a previous version of my company approaching this issue through a 5-layer model: context on top, content underneath it, and then three other layers including infrastructure… and a couple I don’t recall. But in regards to media properties, it’s the top two that really matter – is it better to be a context provider (generally aggregating and directing people towards the content they are interested in), or the content provider?

Why this debate matters is that, in many cases, emerging context providers have effectively been commoditizing various content providers. Think of, for example, Google News – if there’s a big story, the odds are literally thousands of different content providers (from traditional media to bloggers) writing about it. As more and more people use Google News as their context provider, content providers get squeezed – and lose control of ever-important customer relationships and associated marketing opportunities. Suffice to say, it’s very different to have people coming directly to your site for news, versus potentially coming to it based on where Google ranks your take on a particular story.

What’s got me thinking about it again is some experiments we’ve been doing with chTONGUEeek, a comedy / satire site that I’m involved with that started up a few months ago. Suffice to say, we have a lot of competition, and it’s a challenge to draw traffic. We’ve been trialing a bunch of different approaches (with the only rule being it has to be “free”), and by far our most successful have been through the Reddit Funny page. We started posting certain stories up there about a month ago, and the two that attracted the most attention (here and here) are responsible for almost as much traffic as all of or other posts combined.

So we’re loving the Reddit right now, and are also enjoying reading all the other funny stories that people put up there. But as I monitor what’s going on, from a research side I constantly question the emerging “relationship” between our sites. Notably, even when we get a fair bit of traffic from Reddit, the “time on the site” metrics seem to be much, much lower than traffic that comes from other sources. As of yet, we don’t seem to be developing too many “relationships” with these readers, and thus we’re continually subject to the meritocratic competition on that site to draw people in.

Hopefully, if we keep posting stuff people find funny this dynamic will shift a bit – but I’m not expecting it to shift TOO much. While I’d love to have that many more people coming directly to our site, as someone who enjoys funny content I realize I generally only go to sites like Reddit – where the community directs me towards the funniest stuff. In turn, it leads me to thinking that context may indeed be king – but still a very different sort of king than has existed in the past, and one that I’m relatively happy to bow down to.

So what does that make it (and other such sites)? Does the term “benevolent King” seem appropriate? Or, due to the democratic nature of such sites, should we be dropping the whole “King” thing all together?

As I’ve mentioned a few times on here, chTONGUEeek is one of the fun little side projects I’m working on. We’re pretty excited today as traffic is trending to shatter the previous daily record (based on this post) – in fact, if things keep up, we’ll get more visitors today than we’ve had in the last month. And the reason for all this traffic is simply the power of Reddit – which continues to amaze me in the simple yet powerful way that “good’ content can reach it’s appropriate audience. Now I’m just trying to figure out whether such sites mean that “content is king”, or instead if they prove “context is king”, but a rather benovolent sort that really empowers the peasants…

As my “about me” section covers, I’ve got a few side projects – and chTONGUEeek is one of my favorites. This post is for the economics types – and like the Jewish Dentist in Seinfeld, my economics training gives me the leeway to take these jabs. Anyone else might be accused of being an anti-economidite .