publisher2.0
Update:I re-read Scott’s post and think I may have mis-interpreted it. I think he is saying the flaw is in the way the ads are sold, not online advertising itself, to which I agree. (Could be the Black and Tans. I’m Italian, but my mom says we are all Irish on St. Patrick’s, so I have a Guiness and some Corned Beef to celebrate too.)
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I’m usually on the same page as Scott Karp, but not today.
Maybe it’s because I’m snowed in and it’s St.Patrick’s (Black and Tans), but what he calls a flaw of online adverting, I call a fix to a flaw of traditional advertising.
First of all, it’s not only Yahoo and the big boys getting premium rates for page views. As the producer of a couple local newspaper websites, I can say that our page-views are worth much more than $1 per a thousand.
It’s true that national advertiser can sometimes get that CPM, but it more like $4 to $18 per CPM and that doesn’t include the text ads we have on the page. Nor does it take into account that each page-view serves 2- 4 display ad impressions. And some pages are sponsored also.
All in all, I’d estimate that our cost per reach is lower than our in-print advertiser cost per reach, but not that much lower.
The fact is, I don’t think either rate is as valuable as the cost, so we are in agreement that pay-per-click is bringing down the the total value of a page view.
But that’s exactly what we want, as an industry. Wha?
Like Scott says, it’s about knowing who your users are. The value of an ad is in what value it delivers to the advertiser, not in what perceived value any salesperson can convince the advertiser that a particular buy has.
And, like I’m sure Scott knows, the internet is best at bringing the margin between cost and value together, to zero in some cases.
It’s not a flaw, it’s a virtue.
I guess that means that high traffic does not equal a business model. Popularity is not enough, though huge popularity is still enough for the time being.
I think that’s just because we are in the huge transition. We now value things by the old model, “perceived and estimated value.” We soon will value them by the new model, “true value.”
That’s where Doc’s VRM will play a large role, as well as gestures and intention.
I see VC’s as the ones placing faith in page-views, moreso than web 2.0 companies. Most Alot of them are aiming right, I think.
Who can’t resist the allure of high traffic, though.
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
I don’t know that I doubt that Google’s share of online advertising will decline, but I think I disagree with some of Scott Karp’s reasons.
First, he presents a view of Search Marketing from a traditional advertiser perspective when in fact, it more closely follows a direct mail model.
Many of these keyword buyers don’t need to question whether they lose faith in Search ads, or even if a substantial portion is click fraud. What they need and should know is whether a particular campaign resulted in a positive return on investment.
This isn’t something they question. They look at the number of conversions a campaign made, and if that number is good enough to warrant continuing. If not they change, test, and review again.
Second, Karp says that Ad dollars follow audience.
It used to be true and still is to some extent, but this is the age of the long tail and very few sites aggregate that long tail as well as search engines.
Who, but search engines or ebay can aggregate an audience for a company to market niche products without extreme waste?
While Scott’s conclusions may be true, I can’t say I’m buying his reasoning here.
Mar 09 2006 01:45 pm |
Google and
publisher2.0 |
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Scott Karp says we are still in the 1.0 stage, not 2.0. Well, who knows?
One thing that caught my attention:
This is why Media/Web 2.0 needs Marketing 2.0 — we need a new economic paradigm for valuing attention, which will create a new paradigm for value creation in Media/Web 2.0 and enable the “the good stuff will rise to the top,” as Tom Glocer puts it.
So what is this new paradigm? I don’t know, but if Alex Barnett is right, it involves letting go of the Old Media paradigm completely. It involves realizing that blogging is more 1.0 than 2.0, and that the economics of Web 2.0 are still utterly 1.0.
What I’ve been noticing lately is that there is too much good stuff out there. It’s impossible for any Attention engine to possibly give me “only the good stuff.”
If I gather all the articles and posts in one week that I consider worthy of reading and limit my Attention engine to just that number, I’m still overloaded.
So, it seems to me, that an Attention engine will not only know what I’m interested in right now, but what kind of depth I might be looking for.
Check his Calendar. Got a meeting in ten minutes? Show him the unread items from the people attending. Still have four minutes? Show him a few posts relating to the topic.
Save that post about OPML feed grazers till later when he has time to enjoy it because nobody in the meeting even knows what OPML is and he usually likes to write a blog post right after he reads a good post about OPML. No time for that now. : )
Which is to say, it’s more than bubbling good content. A good Attention engine will know to hide some items that you would love to read, but just can’t afford to now.
It may be that enough time goes by that these items become irrelevant and are never shown to you, or only at some later date when you aggregate a topic for reference in an essay you are writing.
There is nothing out there right now that even comes close to this type of behavior, that I would trust to hide certain items from me.
And this is why we are so excited about feed and post grazing. It condenses and expands topics making the wealth of good content more manageable.
But even this is not enough.
I say that this is Attention 1.1, if I may continue along Scott Karp’s path of numbering.
Like the reference to Alex Barnett’s contention to let the Old Media paradigm go, Attention 2.0 will be letting go the idea that we can filter everything or even that we can humanly keep up with everthing that we would find valuable.
The River of News , Feed Grazing, and the Attention engine in general all indicate that we admit we can’t keep up.
The blogosphere and the network in general are pushing our limits of how large of a social network we can really have without being overwhelmed.
While it’s easy and natural(sometimes) to form your social network offline based upon whose company you enjoy and the fact that you are, at any given time, geographically limited to one location., there is a harder decision coming down the pike, since your judgement of other’s online largely resides in whether they have something interesting to say.
Either you or your Attention engine is going to have to make that decision. And some really great conversations are going to have to get filtered out, not just the ones you don’t want.
Some Reading Lists (*glists) will become social networks that need dynamic filtering tools added to them.
Other Reading Lists will be tools for social networks that act as the filters themselves like an email list does today.
Wrap these items up with the collective wisdom that can be distilled from them, as James Corbett has been pointing out lately with del.icio.us, and you may have arrived at Web, Media, and Attention 2.0.
But I wouldn’t upgrade until 2.1 or 2.2, because they are still finding bugs. ; )
Scott Karp of Publisher 2.0 writes,
Does “news” and information filtering really require professional “expertise” at any point in the process, or can we really just do it all ourselves? Since we know that professionals are fallible — doctors make mistakes, stupid laws get passed, lawyers want to sue everyone — let’s get rid of them altogether. Or, maybe we just embrace the idea that “news” isn’t as important as law and medicine — who cares whether we get it right?
Well, yes but a Lawyer takes years to understand the ins and outs of a court system. Same with a Doctor and the body.
While you can argue that of a news person, it is only a small subset of the editorial portion of a news organization that is needed here.
Not as many editors and a columnist is basically anyone who is an expert on a subject that can write well.
For that matter, we can trim down the photography department, meld interactive with PR etc.
I’m all for News professionals, but not the same old news organizations. Those are going away.
But the argument was more toward an editor versus the collective.
Here, while a professional can provide a much needed function to the wild, at what point does a a professional become a “good member of the news community”, and a “good member of the news community become professional quality.”
While some journalistic methodologies are not intuitive and need years of training, it isn’t exactly open heart surgery.
