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| Friday, December 9, 2005 |
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Burp! 
There's an 'icky' in 'sticky'.
It's alive!
| | Far as I know, not many sources are making money with it. A lot, however, are making money because of it. The syndicated world may not look like an economy yet. But trust me, it is. |
| | At this early stage in its long future history, syndication is primarily a feature of blogging, which is primarily the product of too many people to count. Blogging is not about large-scale things. It's about human beings who have no scale other than themselves. Only you can be good at being you, and nobody else is the same as you. Syndication does more to expand individual human potential than anything since the invention of type. Or perhaps ever. The syndicated world economy is the one that grows around unleashed personal powers of expression, productivity, creation, distribution, instruction, influence, leadership--whatever. |
| | In a loose sense, syndication is one side of conversation. Think about conversation in the best sense of the word--the way people teach and learn from each other, the way topics start and move along. Syndication makes that happen in huge ways. |
| | Now more than ever, power is personal. Companies large and small will succeed by taking advantage of that fact. And by watching developments that aren't just coming from The Usual Suspects. Including the Usual Economic Theories. |
| | For example, not everything in an economy is about exchange, or the value chain, or about trade-offs of this for that. Many values come out of effort and care made without expectation of return. Consider your love for your parents, spouses, children, friends and good work. Consider what you give and still get to keep. Consider debts erased by forgiveness. Consider how knowledge grows without its loss by anyone else. |
| | Sayo Ajiboye, the Nigerian minister who so blew my mind in conversations we had in a plane nearly five years ago (Google them up if you like), taught me that markets are relationships and not merely conversations. Relationships, he said, are not just about exchange. They cannot be reduced to transactions. If you try, you demean the relationships themselves. |
| | Also, in spite of the economic framings of our talk about morality and justice ("owing" favors, "paying" for crimes, "just" desserts), there is a deeper moral system that cannot be understood in terms of exchange. In fact, when you bring up exchange, you miss the whole thing. (I believe many great teachers have tried in futility to make this point, for millenia.) Whatever it is, its results are positive. Growth in one place is not matched by shrinking in another. Value in both systems is created. But in the latter one, the purpose is not always or exclusively exchange or profit. At least not from the activity itself. There are because effects at work. And we're only beginning to understand them, because we're just beginning to practice them in a huge new way. |
Distrust the trumpets
| | What Gates is saying - and it will not be music to Google's ears - is that there's too much profit right now in online advertising. |
| | Lord Nathan Rothschild said "Buy to the sound of cannons, sell to the sound of trumpets." In 1810. Old Joe Kennedy (father and grandfather to all those politicians) used to give the same advice. |
| | There's a lot to like about Google. But its stock price and its dependency on advertising revenue are not among them. |
| | The online ad market is going to become more efficient. Much of the profit that now goes to the operators of the ad-serving technology will be redistributed. Some will go to the advertisers, in the form of lower rates, and some will go to the publishers, in the form of higher commissions. And if Gates is serious - and I'm betting he is - some will go to the internet users themselves, whose clicks, after all, make the whole system work. In the battle for eyeballs, bribery can be a powerful weapon. |
| | Bull's eye. That's the shift that matters. Inefficiency has always been the Achilles heel of advertising. Google has taken advantage of that in a huge way. Kudos for that are well deserved. But better advertising isn't enough. We need to go beyond advertising altogether. We can't keep thinking of markets as containers of fish (excuse me, "consumers") in barrels, and rooting for the builder with the biggest barrels the most captive fish. |
| | Problem is, the grasp of advertisers still exceeds the reach of customers who still find themselves in the consumer/seat/eyeball/enduser position. But that will change. Advertising through Google is far more efficient, and infinitely more accountable, than it ever was through TV, radio, or even newspapers and magazines. But it's still the billboard business. |
| | Even if the ads are tiny blocks of text inserted in blogs and searches — and even if they're personalized and appropriate for the eyeballs exposed to them, they're still billboards. They're still intrusive. And they're still coming from one of very few sources that don't have much competition. Yet. |
| | The day will come when the individual's reach exceeds the marketer's grasp. That's when we'll have real markets again. Symmetrical ones, where buyers and sellers reap the benefits of vast new grounds where inhabitants thrive on independence rather than captivity. |
| | Google is in a great position to take advantage of that environment. And to hasten its development. (Hey, maybe they're already at work on it. I have no idea.) But I'm betting that the companies that make it happen are not the Usual Suspects. Just like Google wasn't a Usual Suspect back when Hotbot, Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo and Altavista competed to "dominate" the search category. |
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