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The Future Of Online Advertising: Entertainment vs. Information There are two principal ways advertisers are trying to create value for consumers on the web — and they must create value because, you know, consumers are in control. On the web, advertisers can provide entertainment or information. How effective is advertising as information on the web? See Google’s $15B in ad revenue — an $5.19 bill

How Link Journalism Could Have Transformed The New York Times Reporting On McCain Ethics I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine): The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded b

After I asserted several times that data is the key to the future of the web, Umair Haque gave my head a good spin by asserting that data is in fact a commodity. Umair is half right — we are increasingly overrun by data, and SOME of it is a commodity. The commodity data is precisely what Google has harnessed, which makes Google so powerful — the data on the open web. Google has perfected value cre

Can Pay-For-Performance Improve The Quality Of Content On The Web? Nick Denton and Gawker Media are wrestling with the problem of content quality on the web — specifically, how to give bloggers incentives to create content that drives traffic based on quality rather than quantity. Gawker has announced that incentive pay for its bloggers will now be based entirely on the number of page views that e

Print is dead and all content wants to be free — two bogeymen of the digital age, with some edge of truth, but based on current visibility, still unlikely at those extremes. But it’s undeniable that the economics of print publishing are very different today than what they were before the web, and more content is available for free on the web than any media company could ever have imagined. Most of

I wrote a long post trying to explain why the page view/CPM model for valuing online media is so problematic, particularly for traditional media companies like newspapers that are trying to transition their business models online. But Jordan Bitterman of Digitas summed it up in two sentences (in a Fortune piece about future of the Washington Post): “You’re almost always going to be able to find in

The death of print publishing is coming, it’s just a matter of whether it happens in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years. I’m betting it happens sooner than anyone expects. Colin Crawford, the SVP of online for IDG, posted some stunning figures: Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline in our print revenues. This occurred in the US in 2006 and in Europe during the

According to SEO Todd Mailcoat, getting three stories to the homepage of Digg puts you in the top 1% of Digg users, and it takes “months” to build up a what Todd calls a “reputable” Digg account. Those statistics struck me as stunning, so I decided to dig into Digg’s top user data (which loads painfully slow, as if Digg want to discourage people from digging around.) It turns out that only the top

The obligatory (self-indulgent) prognostications — in no particular order or degree of certainty: Major print publication ceases publishing in print This is inevitable, and the probability increases each year, so it’s a pretty safe prediction — the real tipping point will happen when a publisher convinces top advertisers to value ads on the web-only pub as much (or nearly as much) as they valued t

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., Gawker, TechCrunch, Paid Content — they are successful at thei

A Lot of User-Generated Content Is Really User-Appropriated Content The widely-used and much reviled term “user-generated content” implies that somebody is making something. But the dirty little secret of “user-generated” sites like YouTube and MySpace is that much of the content is not made by the users themselves — it’s appropriated from someone else. So while everyone was watching Google engage

More Evidence That Media 2.0 May Be Less Profitable Than Media 1.0 There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost): In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growt

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems to be (see John Smith, with a very funny mock

If the “long tail” is the organizing principle of web/media 2.0, why shouldn’t we expect revenue distribution to follow the same pattern, with a handful of companies (i.e. Google, Yahoo) controlling most of the revenue and the remaining online players fighting over the crumbs? When Google found a way to monetize the long tail through AdSense, it became the “head” of a new long tail. We shouldn’t m

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair and Jeff working at the absolute bleeding edge of current strategic thinking (pun intended).

Should the goal of media be to give people what they WANT or what they NEED — or both? To get 100% what you want is pure echo chamber, like Fox News and many political blogs. To get a 100% of what you need may or may not involve too much “broccoli,” depending on how you live your life. (Thanks to Pete Cashmore getting me thinking about this.) Years ago, I taught test prep classes for The Princeton

The news that Google is testing rich media supports the view that traditional brand advertising is not about to go away. Having wrung every penny from smaller advertisers with more transactional businesses — which are the ones that work best with text ads — Google is aiming now at the BIG advertisers who have BIG brands and need rich media to grow, manage, and maintain their brands. Kudos to JenSe

There is a bubble in the tech industry, but it has nothing to do with the behavior of venture capital, as so many people are discussing. There’s a bubble because the tech industry is trying to be the new media industry, and very few people in the tech industry understand what’s really happening to the economics of media. There is a bubble in media, and if it pops before we can get our arms around