Reddit

I heard about reddit.com a little over two years ago and since then its slogan, "The front page of the internet" has absolutely come true in my life. Almost any time I get onto the internet it is the first site I go to.

Essentially what the site does is display links submitted by the community and allows that same community to judge and jointly rank each link by giving each member the ability to up or down vote the various links until the most popular apear on the front page. So instead of crawling through several sites to find interesting and relevant content, other people sift through it and find the good stuff for you.

At this time there isn't any direct online marketing on the site because that is one of the principles it was built upon but that doesn't mean advertising for companies and services doesn't still happen daily. The only difference is exposure isn't paid for, but rather earned. I have seen several videos either sponsored by or directly created by a company or organization that goes viral and earns enough respect or is comical enough to climb the ranks of reddit and get exposure from hundreds of thousands of people in the reddit community.

Tubalr

I found this really cool website called Tubalr.com that compiles playlists of music video links and streams them continuously upon request. It is a similar idea to Pandora radio except it plays the music through different streaming and hosting sites (mainly YouTube in my experience).

As of right now there isn't any advertising on the site as it seems to be in the early stages of development. I think that if traffic were to build, possibly via various online marketing tools like Google Adwords, than hosting tasteful amounts of advertising would be a good way to create a revenue stream for the amount of work it seems like the project must have taken. I look forward to keeping tabs on this budding website's progress and seeing how it compares to websites made in the same vein.

Netflix: The Future of Television

Since 1997 Netflix has been innovating the way people view media and changing the landscape of how people rent and watch movies. First starting with their revolutionary mail based subscription service, they once again innovated in a big way in regards to their online streaming services, giving people the opportunities to watch hundreds of movies with just a click of the mouse. And now, in 2013, Netflix is once again innovating and taking on the conventions of how we watch television.
         There has been a paradigm shift in recent years where instead of people basing their viewing schedules on when their favorite shows are set to air, they are instead basing them on when it is convenient through services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO GO, and Amazon Prime. Television networks have definitely taken notice to this trend due to their decreased television ratings and have often responded by streaming their shows online through their respective websites, as well as producing internet exclusive content for their online viewers. Netflix is on the forefront of this trend with the release of their new political drama, House of Cards. House of Cards is the first netflix exclusive show and, based on the response and the quality of the show, I believe it will start a snowball effect of these services creating this type of content. 86% of current netflix users claim that they will keep their subscription to netflix if House of Cards is available to them. I feel like such a positive response will inspire other sites to adopt similar business models and potentially change the way we watch television forever.