Thrudigital

The idea of value being created through scarcity of a product or commodity isn’t new but as it’s something that we’ve always discussed with clients, I decided to write a post about this tactic after being prompted by a site that I rediscovered today. The Sixty One is a music site that was written about on techcrunch today and is a y-combinator funded music discovery site that has some pretty tasty features & functions, including a javascript activity stream which is presented on top of the page in the bottom right of the browser screen, but that’s an aside…

The reason I was prompted to write this post however isn’t because of the site’s funky javascript activity stream but the way it uses scarcity around the favouriting functionality. Limiting the amount of hearts an individual user can attribute a song has two key effects. The first is that users associate higher value with this function and how they use it. The second, which is really linked to the first, is that this has the added benefit of minimise users  gaming the system to get a particular band to the homepage meaning that, in this case, only the best tracks should be promoted to the homepage.

At thrudigital we have proposed the use of scarcity as a way of creating value when speaking to a number of clients about their projects. Often the discussion is related to whether invites a user has to give out should be limited, but also in the case of votes as we proposed for a crowdsourcing concept we presented to a client a couple of months back.

If you have any experience of using scarcity in either of these ways or any others, I’d be interested in hearing about it, so please feel free to leave a comment below.