The discovery democracy: how social discovery is transforming entertainment

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Trust and familiarity dominate entertainment discovery
  3. The influence, impact and importance of recommendation
  4. Social discovery: democratization or distraction?
  5. Controlling the message in the social-discovery era
  6. The discovery landscape: recommendations thin on the ground
  7. Digital discovery service case studies
  8. Conclusion
  9. About Mark Mulligan

1. Summary

New social tools and sites are facilitating a democratization of discovery, where one-to- many recommendations are no longer the exclusive domain of professional media and traditional tastemakers.

But this discovery democracy comes at a cost: Consumers now have at their disposal more sources of entertainment discovery and recommendation tools across more platforms and devices than ever before. Because of that, they find themselves bombarded with a bewildering overabundance of recommendations and have no effective means of filtering the good from the bad, the useful from the useless, the relevant from the irrelevant. Little wonder, then, that mainstream media fans continue to largely shun these new digital discovery tools in favor of traditional alternatives.

This report examines the new world of discovery and recommendations. Using data from a recent GigaOM Pro survey of 1,165 U.S. consumers, we examine the different types of media fans, how they fit into the current media industry, and how their influence is creating opportunities and challenges for traditional media marketers.

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