What if media isn’t a business anymore? What if it becomes like poetry — lot’s of people do it, but nobody ever expects to make any money from it.
I know, just because there aren’t obvious answers yet, doesn’t mean somebody won’t figure it out, but for the moment we all sound like the horse and carriage industry 100 years ago. Or the US manufacturing industry 20 years ago. There isn’t always a solution to structural decline.
A while ago, I wrote about how content creators will work for free, or even pay to be able to get their creations in front of an audience who cares. But what I failed to realize at that point was that the key change with Web 2.0 (or Media 2.0, if you prefer) is not that content creators aren’t motivated by money and therefore will work for free, but that those creatives can now distribute their work without inter-media-ries. In the past, creative types have always worked for very little money: think of freelancers scraping together a living with feature article assignments or independent filmmakers maxing out their credit cards to make their first movie. In many or perhaps most creative fields it’s the same. The drive to create isn’t based on a desire for money. In the past people without the creative urge but with a drive for money have been able to skim off the cream from the work of creators. No longer. Now, content has filed for divorce from advertising. Irreconcilable differences. Content no longer needs advertising to get published and to get to the people who want to watch it, read it, and listen to it. With Tivo, I can watch my favorite shows sans commercials. With industry analyst blogs and news feeds from IT periodicals, I know the latest on technology without seeing a single Sun or Oracle sponsored magazine page. With a shopping suggestion site like Stylehive, I can figure out what to buy without clicking on a single ad.
Advertising is dead. When’s the last time you clicked on a web ad? I’m online everyday, but I don’t pay any attention to the ads. In fact, after hearing a telephone ring and a dog bark way too many times today on My Yahoo! (did anyone else see that annoying ad?), I finally took the time to turn off images from external locations in Firefox. Who does click those ads? Bots.
That’s not to say, however, that marketing is dead. Marketing is very much alive. We still need information about products, perhaps now more than ever, in a post-scarcity economy, where we can’t have everything we want but we can have way more than we need. I regularly read Lucky and Domino magazines, so-called “shopping” magazines that have no actual articles. They gather together interesting products I might like to try. I go through and rip out pages with moisturizers that might fight the dry Denver air or lipstick in a pretty pinky brown that I don’t have yet, even though my drawers are filled with pinky-brown lipsticks. I mostly ignore the ads because the editorial picks are more intriguing, less blatantly commercial in presentation. I get ideas for books and music and household products I might like to spend my money on from friends, family, and other bloggers. I haven’t gotten immersed in Stylehive yet, but maybe it just takes a little while to get with the 2.0 product discovery program. I bet someday soon I’ll click over there when I want to find a new purse to replace my Coach logo bag. That is, unless Coach notices that one of their loyal customers is in need of some purchase suggestions.
Stowe Boyd has the best read on what’s happening with advertising:
I believe that something that looks suspiciously like advertising will persist for some time, since it is easy to do, easy to insert into other things. But easy to do and recognize, and the whole notion of sticking something foreign into a stream is ugly, and easy to block or ignore. We will slowly transition to alternatives, although they may actually wind up being called ads. Embedded product placement, testimonials and endorsements, and other personalized “advertising” will survive and expand. (I plan a post on experiential marketing, later this week, following up on that thread.) [emphasis added]
Experiential marketing…. yeah. Coach, feel free to send an experience my way.
17 Comments
Irreconcilable differences! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. As ever. I’m going to get a little marketing wonky on you, but, I agree with your underlying theme completely. Advertising is now, was, and always will be part of promotions within the marketing mix. I agree that web ads as we know them are probably terminal, but… I think that “as we know them” is going away fast. Stowe has it exactly right for my tastes. No one will object to promotions materials that leverage the 2.0-ness of it all and speak in meaningful, relevant ways to their needs. If I stuck information about a Coach bag or (you started this, remember) “pinky-brown lipsticks,” while on Amazon, Stylehive, or my own site, the odds you’re going to purchase probably jump up dramatically. In fact, I think you’d be more likely to purchase if I showed you on my site specifically because you know who I am and are more likely to trust that I know something about your preferences in “pinky-brown lipstick.”
While I agree that content creators don’t need advertising in its traditional sense, the fact remains that content creators eventually need to eat. And in those cases, smart marketers will be ready with Coach bags, lipsticks, and who knows what all else that we don’t even know we need yet, promoting them in ways that show their value because of what they know about us (i.e., that we choose to read content from post-modern super-moms or writers/marketers).
is this where we bloggers who don’t plan to make a fortune from putting adsense on our blogs are allowed to out ourselves?
i’m so sick of reading about people who start blogs for the express purpose of making money from advertising. Each to their own, I guess… but I’m just not interested (and I don’t think people who read my blog would be interested either).
i think there will *always* be a place for intelligent advertising. Where people actually put a bit of effort into creating something that I will appreciate in order to promote goods and services that there is a fair chance I’ll be interested in.
If I never see another adsense link or banner ad, I’ll be a very happy camper.
Tim, I don’t have any academic knowledge of advertising and marketing, so I’m sure I’m butchering some concepts and not getting exactly how advertising fits in with marketing. You’re right–if you were to mention some great pinky-brown lipstick on your blog I’d probably run out and buy it! So there’s a place for some sort of “advertising” but not the kind of generically targeted, impersonal stuff we’re used to.
Leisa, I feel the same. I blog to express myself, to learn, to make connections. If I ever make money as a derivative of it, great. But I don’t have any plans to monetize my blog and I don’t like how advertising might twist my ideas.
Anne
After writing my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’ for over a year I have a few thoughts of my own on the topic.
On growing your audience, maybe the closest comparison is a syndicated columnist, the more outlets that pick/distribute your content, the more exposure you get. I have been quite succesful with ‘Now Public’ for example. Obviously you also need to have topics that resonate with people. It is all a trial and error process.
On generating income from content: it might not happen directly from the blog but expanding some of the topics in e-book form with photos and more and selling them at a reasonable price might be a way to go
It turns the publishing logic on its head. You get an audience first then you can get your ‘book’ out.
For the advertising, I tried GoogleAds and now YahooPublisher and also affiliate programs but I would rather have Static Quality Ads directly related to the topic I write about (wine ad with wine post…).
I will stop at that.
Take care
SERGE
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
Serge, yes, it’s interesting that a new way to be successful in writing and publishing a book is to grow your audience first (e.g., by a blog) and then write it. It absolutely turns publishing logic on its head.
You have really good ideas about it. Did you see that Darren Rowse (problogger.net) is doing a feature on effective blogging habits this week? I wonder if you would want to write up your ideas and submit them… he is going to link to everyone who emails him about their posts on the topic.
If you meant me, I would be happy to.
Actually, Stowe, I meant Coach, the leather goods company. But I’d probably be better off with an experience from you than with another purse! You are an excellent idea coach…
Your ideas echo those of Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’:
“The post-consumption consumer is out of things to buy. We have what we need, we want very little…”
As an aside, you discuss blogs and other creative endeavors as a mass market, still. The implicit assumption is that all these creative people will want to have a huge readership, fame, fortune, champagne in limousines, and, sometimes, a six-figure Adsense income.
I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Just as most creative people do not create primarily to make money, they do not create primarily to be seen either. People create because, well, that’s what they do. The work is the reward. A lot of blogs, photographs, music, short stories and so on are still being made for the desk drawer, or for an audience of friends and family. For every aspiring Kos-wannabe, you have a hundred blogs that the owner is perfectly happy if their friends check in every month or so.
These people are probably completely orthogonal to media in any traditional sense; they are more akin to the railway hobbyists with their amazing miniature train landscapes in the basement; or avid concert ticket stub collectors; or people renovating iconic vintage cars. It’s just that, as with these other hobbyists, the cost of connecting with other like-minded people has plummeted to near zero. They will not replace traditional media simply because their goals and interests are completely different. If they write something of general interest it’s purely accidental.
ps. the “preview” thing is seriously sucky (I can type about one character a second); please make a way to turn it off. Ds.
The first comment on this page tries to make the point that
Janne - Actually, the kind of blogs I was thinking of in context of this post were ones that do replace or supplement mass media–for example, blogs at ZDNet or written by industry analysts. For now, most of these feeds come without advertising so you can get pretty good mass media type content ad-free. But you’re absolutely right that the vast majority of blogs are by hobbyists and will not replace mass media. I don’t think mass media will go away. But I have questions whether it can continue to be ad-supported, or will have to be more directly funded by subscriptions or something else. What else? I don’t know.
As for the comment preview, sorry about that. It’s very fast on my browser but I imagine some might have trouble with the JavaScript. I’m going to look into adding a checkbox to enable/disable it for those who are interested. Thanks for mentioning it.
Dave - you’re right; content creators can always have a day job. One caveat to this “divorce” that I’m thinking about, though, is that certain content productions–movies, feature articles about things happening in far away places, popular music albums–do require significant funding to come about. Where does the money come from that, if advertising is no longer viable? Perhaps advertising stays around for that but also maybe people will have to pay more for that sort of content (and execs involved in its publication/distribution will have to accept less money).
This is already happening with newspapers. Though providing solid news coverage requires money, classified ads are moving to other venues like craigslist. How can newspapers continue to provide this coverage if the advertising no longer can support it?
Anne, regarding how some high-cost content will continue to get financed, the answer for some of it may well be that it won’t. It is not completely inconceivable, for instance, that the kind of detailed, thourough coverage of even marginal news that newspapers excel at will disappear, not because nodody wants it, but because not enough people want it enough to make it pay for itself.
Similarily, with movie audiences fragmenting, it’s not impossible for the blockbuster movie phenomenon - one that isn’t all that old, by the way - to disappear again, in favour of a higher number of lower budget, lower quality (though often as much fun) movies instead.
Comment preview: it’s very nicely AJAX:y, but it does mean a round trip to the server every time we type a character. You’re probably pretty close to the server; I’m in Japan, however, and have the ping times to show for it. An obvious improvement in the preview code would be to always defer the preview update until there’s a (say) 1 second pause in the typing. I really love the neat feature; it just doesn’t work too well for me.
Janne - perhaps you’re right that some high-cost content will no longer be financed. The market (combined with social and cultural forces, of course) will have its say.
I disabled the live comment preview but I’m really surprised to hear that you are seeing server round trips–that is really ugly. I didn’t implement it myself (it’s a plugin) but my reading of the code indicates it generates JavaScript on the fly to update the document on the client side without communicating with the server. I’ll have to spend more time looking into it.
Do you mind telling me what browser/platform you are using?
So it’s not doing a round trip? Strange in that case. I’m using linux (Ubuntu if it matters; it shouldn’t) and Firefox 1.0.8.
Great post. Turning it over in my mind a little trying to see what falls out, or up, or in.
One question:
If advertising is dead, why is Google making billions? That can’t all be bots, can it?
The thing about AdWords advertising is that it has an immediate measurability to it that you cannot duplicate offline easily. So when you stop making money on an ad, based not on clicks but conversions, you stop the ad. In other words: something must be working there, or all those people advertising via Google would just stop.
I was exaggerating a bit, it’s true. It’s not reasonable to conclude that because I don’t click on ads, no one else does either. Obviously, there’s lots of money to be made still with online advertising, and like you say, if people weren’t getting results from their ads, they wouldn’t do it.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that content wants to be liberated from advertising. Well, some content does–a lot of creators make content just so they can make money off of advertising.
I’m still turning it over in my mind too.
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