I could paint a Mona Lisa,
I could be another Caesar;
Compose an oratorio that is sublime.
The door’s not shut on my genius – but
I just don’t have the time.
Like Flanders & Swann’s sloth, many people are secretly convinced that they could write a masterpiece. Almost everyone also believes that they could start an internet business — if they only had the time.
I once considered starting a micro-swearing network called Touretter — an angrier version of Twitter. And a group of us recently debated starting Farmville: The European Union Edition. This was to be an online farming game where you own a tract of virtual land and then receive huge sums of imaginary money for doing absolutely nothing. Once or twice a year, you would fill in Form 407B205b, after which you’d receive a virtual cheque from Brussels with which you could add a new Jacuzzi to your virtual farmhouse. In the end, we decided that it was too depressingly realistic.
But having an idea for an online business is easy. Getting the execution and the timing right is the hard part. The annals of internet failures are packed with good ideas (does anyone else remember Pointcast?) which were launched badly or too early.
But I agree with Paul Graham’s analysis: paulgraham.com/ambitious.html. His ideas about which areas seem ripe for a big, disruptive innovation are astute; in particular, his point that email is long overdue for reinvention. Many of us spend hours a week churning through emails — yet the functionality has scarcely improved in 20 years.
Other rich areas include smartphone applications (such as the taxi booking app Hailo) and new forms of payment (such as Pingit, Barclays’ mobile payment service). These are simple solutions to life’s everyday problems — and life has many more trivial irritations to solve. I also think that new types of pay-to-view television offer great potential. The common taste for DVD box-set binges and for watching 30-second YouTube clips suggests that people’s television consumption habits are diversifying.
I know that my taste in television is not typical. The X Factor leaves me cold; my idea of TV heaven would be a two-hour Jonathan Meades documentary on the history of the Teasmade. All the same, one day there might be pay-per-view channels for people like me. A few thousand of us will pay £5 each to commission Mr Meades to make a documentary about the cultural significance of the Breville sandwich-maker. It will be a televisual version of the interesting book publishing model you’ll find at unbound.co.uk, where readers pay authors to write books.
Louis C.K., the Bostonian comedian, has already shown that people will pay for good video content, even when it is inexpensive to make. He raised over $1 million in under two weeks, simply by posting the video of his stage show online for $5 and asking fans nicely not to pirate it.
Cultural television has a smaller audience than comedy, but it is a valuable and dedicated one. My friend Don Boyd has just launched hibrow.tv, which gives an excellent idea of the possibilities for intelligent television.
But my biggest plea is for someone to launch a premium-priced, football-free news channel. This is not a snobbish point (well, not very). I don’t mind watching football — the game itself. But news, conversation and commentary about football and footballers is the most moronic, pointless and IQ-sapping activity on the planet. The moment they launch Sky News Football-Free HD, I’m in for £5 a month.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.
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