The economics of viral loops

Viral loops are now a big part of product design. In looking at the various ways loops are modeled in various services, I realise there is a big point of failure: the email invite.






Email invites have effectively turned everyone into a spammer. In this age of increasing attention deficit, this current form of email invites cannot be sustained. The attention costs are too high such that people will ignore them all together.

To create better viral loops, we need to rethink about value adding. How can we create loops that benefits the recipients, instead of imposing more costs on them? If we rethink invites as a form of advertisement, can we apply the economics of branding here?

One way is to think of invites (advertisements) as content. Is that possible?

Posted in: advertising