Pageviews aren’t dead, it’s CPM that’s dead, and VRM is born

A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.

Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.

So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)

Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.

Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.

Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.

Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.

By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.

What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.

So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.

Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?

We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.

That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.

Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.

A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.

Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.

UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control

I used to go nuts when clueless folks called site visitors “viewers” instead of “users”.

My point was that if all they are doing is viewing and not interacting, then our product needs to get a little better.

Well, the times have changed and now I agree with Stowe Boyd on the term “User Generated Content” .

He’s got it right. We are all here and the world is flat. So any term that implies a publisher->reader or site->user type of relationship is headed for trouble.

As Stowe says, we are now all participants.

He says we are participants in Participatory Media, but I’m even against the word media.

Media can be disintermediated while participants in a conversation really can’t.

Now I’m fully aware that the term media can be used to mean film, tape and digital rather than Media Companies. But the reason why we call them media companies is because media is the plural of medium.

The web is the first mass distribution medium that isn’t scarce in it’s allocation, either through economics or scarcity of availability, like limited TV frequencies (channels)

By it’s very nature, then, it is qualitatively different from anything else we have ever called media.

But I’m not here to argue semantics.

I only know too well from first-hand experience that many “media” companies still see User Generated Content as some lower form of media species.

Their attempts to exploit it will be as successful as chasing a lizard’s long tail.

UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control.

Economy of Abundance changes the way we do business

Great post from Chris Anderson about the Economics of Abundance.

More evidence of the commoditization of everything. Technology and Media are just not valuable in the same old way.

If Barry Diller gets it, maybe the tide is shifting for Old Media companies. Perhaps the Old Media Doom sday clock will click back a minute or two.

Still, there are many people in these companies who are calling the shots who will not be able to break out of the mold. These types have such a great fear of failure, that they just can’t adjust to the methodology of “failing your way to success” which is necessary in this user-centric world.