Doc Searls Weblog

6 responses to “Some research questions”

1. 

   George

   September 21, 2010 at 8:50 pm

   Hi Doc,

   How interesting. I am also starting to research this area and I suspect probably for the same reasons as you. I believe that online advertising is the next bubble and it is going to cause some major heartburn for a lot of people, including Google.

   I read Prof Eric Clemens article on TechCrunch entitled: Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet, and was taken aback, but not surprised by the vehemence of the comments. Lots of vested interests I suspect.

   I think there is little doubt that online advertising is the next bubble and it will be burst by the free-rider problem of economics. I have set out my reasoning here http://bit.ly/dBHssu. I’d be interested in your views.

   The main argument against the good professor, and I suspect that enraged so many people, was the concern about how else services like TechCrunch could be funded.

   And this is where I think it is a bubble. It is difficult to get the figures here but Huffing Post gives us an insight. It has revealed how it will become profitable this year, but it’s assumptions are eye-wateringly optimistic about the income from advertising. Not even Google is achieving what they think they will achieve.

   It seems that Facebook is in the same predicament and many others as well. The facade is starting to crack and the investors are getting nervous.

   Reply
2. 

   Mike Warot

   September 22, 2010 at 11:24 am

   I for one don’t give a rats ass about advertising… it can go hang for all I care.
   The internet is a communications medium, not a billboard.
   What we need to figure out is how to put the focus back on discussion and conversation and informing each other.

   Reply
3. 

   Denis Bourke

   September 22, 2010 at 9:47 pm

   Huh? Isn’t advertising is about communication? Billboards, sandwichboards, in-store demos, papers, magazines, why not Internet? The days when the Internet was a geek’s soapbox are long gone.

   Reply
4. 

   Henk Blanken

   September 26, 2010 at 6:10 am

   It’s all about how effective advertising is, and how the internet changed the game of marketing communication. The more we know about advertising, the less it seems to work. And when we – I’m a journalist in the Netherlands, but this is also true for marketeers in the US – try to convince people of what we do and how well we do it, we use very poor arguments.

   When Jeff Jarvis explains that The New York Times has a larger audience and more political impact than The Wall Street Journal, which has a much larger print circulation, he combines the monthly unique visitors of the websites with print circulation numbers.

   I hope someday someone will come up with a better statistical tool to measure reach.

   Reply
5. 

   best rate source

   October 2, 2010 at 12:17 pm

   Advertising dollars quanitified globally…probably close to a trillion dollars would be my guess, following the money invested into the dot com era for the five year period up until 2001 is also going to be a huge figure. The good news is that these dollars now appear to be more poised to an actual roi for ad dollars online..

   today its all about push versus pull, ad companies are trying to market everywhere you turn and the younger the audience the better, but those on the permission side of the equation, think groupon really are ahead of the curve…look forward to your results.

   Reply
6. 

   Robert

   October 5, 2010 at 4:13 am

   You might check out Jackson Lears’ work (better yet, give him a call). Last time I checked, he was at Rutgers. He wrote No Place of Grace: Anti-modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America, and co-edited The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American history, 1880-1980. His work on the history of advertising is seminal and brilliant.

   Reply