Jarrett Interaction Design, from Mix 08:
| Microsoft views advertising as the key to the web ecosystem economics. And most of their examples are traditional, print-style advertising (banner ads with video, etc.). Much of their investment in these technologies is to drive the advertising business. Seems diametrically opposed to the ClueTrain Manifesto and marketing as conversation. Hugh Macleod, where are you? |
Doc, if advertising stops working… who’s going to pay for Google to keep the lights on and the search results coming, and how?
Building on the previous thought… what if we all get our collective wish and advertising disappears from the the internet?
What if Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and Blogger and Flickr and Twitter and everyone else fails to find a business model that works?
All the silos go away.
Where do we store the grain?
I don’t have the patience to be a good blogger, do I?
If advertising stops working, we all have to store our own grain. We all have to become our own web hosting providers, search engines, etc… or just overtly pay someone to do it for us.
I’m scared.
And excited!
Mike, I don’t think advertising will stop working. Just that it will, as i say in the next post, become part of a larger ecosystem that serves the intentions of buyers at least as well as it serves the attention-grabbing needs of sellers. Both will be part of it. And Google will play both sides.
I actually don’t want advertising to disappear. I just want to come up with something that does a better job of getting customers what they want than advertising can produce alone.
I also don’t think silos = business models. I think there are plenty of business models that rely on voluntary relationship rather than entrapment.
I would gladly pay — on a voluntary basis, in sums of my own choosing — for lots of products and services that are currently free. Right now there is no system for that. I want to help folks build that system. Or collection of systems.
This isn’t all or nothing. This is AND logic I’m talking about here. Not OR.
It’ll be a stretch for folks to think beyond advertising for income. The answer is out there. But we’re going to have to make it.
Doc Searls wrote:
“I actually don’t want advertising to disappear. I just want to come up with something that does a better job of getting customers what they want than advertising can produce alone.”
I’m not sure what type of mechanism you have in mind, but British ISPs have been exploring what is already proving to be a controversial system:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/
Many interesting points have been made by the large number of commenters on the various articles linked to on the above page. Looks like it’s going to be a story that will run and run, at least here in the UK.
Roger,
Yes, that is an icky system that the Register reports on. Nobody wants to be stalked and reported — or whatever it is that they’re doing.
We are not prey to be stalked. We are customers who have far more clues about what we want than any system can guess. And we’re the ones with the money. Let’s equip that first, and let the sellers come up for systems for dealing with it.
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