Love my old colleague Lloyd Gofton’s fillet’n’Fisk job on the IAB/Price Waterhouse report that showed that online advertising revenue (filleting the report and fisking the la-la-la-it’s-not-happening reaction of the TV-spot primacy crowd).
“The truth is that many media sectors have considered the Internet as secondary or supportive to their traditional mediums. The facts are slapping them in the face yet still there is denial.”
Yes, yes and furthermore yes, Mr Gofton.
Recently I had cause to write a brief history of the web. Always a laugh, but one happy accident was that I came across a TED video of Kevin Kelly, WIRED / Whole Earth News founder, editor and general genius, talking about “the next 5,000 days of the web”.
I’ve mentioned this video before, but it’s stuck with me these past few weeks, especially his metaphor of what the web is, so I’m going back to it for a moment. He describes it as a single machine which we all access, look in to with our little screens on phones and computers.
Every two years, the web is doubling in size, Kevin tells us. And as it expands it sucks in everything it touches, connects things, and as it connects them changes the way they work forever.
Take telecoms. Watch as the web approaches mobile telcos. They pause, try to swerve…
[Web expands]
Can’t swerve it. Try to charge people lots of money to use it….
[Web expands]
Set up walled gardens. It’s like the web only safer and cleaner and you have to put a micro-payment in the slot to access each page…
[Web expands]
Can’t do that web wants to be open. People want it to be open. Sell access to social media as a feature of bundled data…
[Web expands]
Someone starts selling Skype access as a mobile service. Suddenly not only is the idea of a new per-MB data business model disappearing but the beautiful, lucrative pay-per-second voice tarriff is under threat…
[Web expands.] Suddenly everything that telcos did is part of the web. It’s absorbed the-industry-formally-known-as-mobile-operators.
Apply the same model to music, to newspapers and to TV. Apply it to marketing, for goodness sake…
All your TV ad revenue are belong to us.
The day digital overtook TV in terms of ad revenue was so inevitable it feels less incredible than it should. “It’s amazing, but we’re not amazed,” as Kelly would say. TV will be assimilated.
(It’s also happening at the moment with human relationships and our social networks. But you know that, right? Your social world is being assimilated into the machine, for better or worse…)
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