"Coopetition, Not Competition" - The New Buzzword for Bloggers

Why Collaborating with Competing Bloggers Can Be A Great Idea!
There’s a buzzword for bloggers looking to blend two priorities: innovative way to increase traffic and bargaining power -“Coopetition”

Coopetition signifies collaboration among business competitors,  an idea that’s picking up steam, especially among online businesses.

The risks of collaborating with rival blogs might seem daunting, but a study by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute finds the benefits are likely to outweigh any disadvantages. The study found that this kind of collaborative competition, when it is healthy and lasted from one to five years, had more than a 50% chance of mutually increasing the relevance and the bottomline of each blogs.

“Nowadays, the best partner might be your direct competitor,” says Paavo Ritala, a professor of Strategy and Innovation at LUT University of Technology in Finland.

“Competitors tend to face similar markets and use similar resources and technologies. They typically have to Knol with similar challenges at large. Thus, with rising costs of R&D and globalizing competition, it often makes sense to collaborate with competitors on product development, innovation and joint marketing.”

Ritala, who co-wrote  "ScienceDirect Report on Coopetition Idea," analyzes Amazon Marketplace.... Amazon’s e-commerce third-party selling platform as a business model that demonstrates coopetition’s efficacy.

Ritala says that the partnership is a win-win situation: Amazon.com benefits since it gets a margin of the sales from the Marketplace, while its third-party sellers also benefit by getting access to a “very large customer base and a popular platform.”

Amazon justifies the terms of the partnership as being best for its customers. “Third-party sales are now 58% of our gross sales because we are committed to helping independent retailers meet the needs of Amazon customers around the globe,” said Amazon spokesperson Joel Sider.

“This year we are on track to spend $15 billion on tools, services, programs and people to fuel the success of sellers, most of whom are small and medium-sized businesses.”

Among the most striking current examples of coopetition, says Adam M Brandenburger, is that between Apple and Samsung.

 While Samsung’s Galaxy and Apple’s iPhone are competing products, Samsung at the same time continues to be one of Apple’s main suppliers (the company supplies screens to Apple).

YouTube and Vimeo have a similar relationship. During an innovation panel at the 2019 ForbesWomen Summit, Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud shared that the video platform joined forces with YouTube, one of its main competitors by allowing creators to publish their videos to YouTube, as well as to other video platforms.

Although the idea of coopetition is becoming more accepted, says Brandenburger, “it is still often seen as a last resort.”

What it unlocked was actually a totally new strategy for our company . . . one of the biggest value-adds in our product, and it all came from flipping the script in terms of how you think about whether someone is a competitor or a partner, and prioritizing the problem you want to solve," said Sud.

Four ways Competing Bloggers Can Benefit from Coopetition
1. Bargaining Power: A single blog or blogger may find it very difficult to bargain favorably with some commercial opportunities, but when the blogger is collaborating with other competing blogs, like a thug of war, they have more pulling strength to influence things in their space.

2. Sharing Traffic: Competing bloggers may decide to collaborate in SHARING TRAFFIC and backlinks, by providing contents as a guest blogger in topics which he or she has competitive advantage...  and deliberately mentioning the collaborating blog in his content with backlinks.

3. Sharing knowledge with bloggers you collobrate with will help you save cost and time in research and development issues. Why not ask your coopetitor first??

4. Providing Solutions: Some bloggers may be great as content providers but are not very conversant with technical issues like Alexa, google analytics or alalgorithms. Helping your coopetition solve issues like this can boost mutual relationship and the bargaining power of both blogs.

Part of the struggle for bloggers is understanding how and when to implement the strategy, notes Adrian Slywotzk, a partner at the consulting firm Oliver Wyman and the coauthor of a Harvard Business Review article exploring the coopetition trend.

Slywotzk’s advice for blog owners is to have a clear understanding of the functions that are unique to your company.... you of course don’t want to collaborate with a rival in those areas. But where you’re both trying to get the same job done: That’s where he believes competitor resources  should be allocated.