If I were to blndly guess at an underlying phenomenon, it would be what I've come to call "app pollution" for lack of a better term.
More and more money is being thrown at an ever increasing amount of new apps, and many of which operate on huge losses as long as user numbers remain high. From the other side, entrenched players (twitter, facebook, youtube, big media) are scrambling for ever more aggressive ways to jam themselves into people's lives to hopefully extract revenue and meet the growth shareholders demand.
All of this is being pushed onto a market that has a limited attention span for all of this crap being thrown at them (and a lot of it is pure crap). The result is less and less consumer loyalty, dwindling revenues for everyone, increasing disillusionment on the part of investors, and ever more ridiculous expectations on the part of users: "$1.49 for an app I use every day and that cost at least $50K to develop? I dunno, feels like a premium price."
It's different from the first bubble in that there is actually a lot of non-immaginary value flying around this time, and eveyone is readily embracing the internet and related tech. But there's also more and more crap. There's just too much pollution on the web and in every app store, and it's starting to smell.
Strangely enough, I think there might be a startup idea somewhere in there.
There is an entire historical tranche of business oriented toward commodification, which I believe is what we're seeing applied to internet functionality as a whole. All kinds of services with nothing much behind them, to the point that business models are being based upon not much more than a Rails gem and force of personality.
More and more money is being thrown at an ever increasing amount of new apps, and many of which operate on huge losses as long as user numbers remain high. From the other side, entrenched players (twitter, facebook, youtube, big media) are scrambling for ever more aggressive ways to jam themselves into people's lives to hopefully extract revenue and meet the growth shareholders demand.
All of this is being pushed onto a market that has a limited attention span for all of this crap being thrown at them (and a lot of it is pure crap). The result is less and less consumer loyalty, dwindling revenues for everyone, increasing disillusionment on the part of investors, and ever more ridiculous expectations on the part of users: "$1.49 for an app I use every day and that cost at least $50K to develop? I dunno, feels like a premium price."
It's different from the first bubble in that there is actually a lot of non-immaginary value flying around this time, and eveyone is readily embracing the internet and related tech. But there's also more and more crap. There's just too much pollution on the web and in every app store, and it's starting to smell.
Strangely enough, I think there might be a startup idea somewhere in there.