Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
Dan Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind, which I still have not read (I should probably remedy that), but which is high up on the “Titles I Wish I Had Thought Of” list.
He also has a new book; “America’s first business book in manga”. Does this imply there are whole series of magna business guides in Japan? I don’t know. Maybe.
Also, Dan really knows how to promote a book:
Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.
Heck. I want to read it.
When I look at the stats for this site, people seem much more interested in Shoes and in anything with the word “Rails” in it than in anything I speculate about advertising. That’s okay — don’t listen to me, listen to Dave Winer.
Wait, you’re saying, Dave’s talking about the Writer’s strike, not about advertising. That’s correct; he’s not saying a word about advertising. He is, however, talking about who gets paid.
Read it again. Think about advertising; think about content creation; think about everything changing.
Or, you know, don’t. We could always put all our eggs in the “advertising will pay for everything forever” basket and just wait until the system falls apart. Then we can complain that no one wants to buy our buggy whips anymore.
I’ve talked about this before, but I think that it bears a continuing discussion.
Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby and the Ruby Inside blog (which you should all read), levels some objections to ad-blocking here:
I’ve never used adblocking, and will never use adblocking unless ads become /so/ obnoxious that I can’t productively experience whatever it is the advertising is plasted to.
Why? Because advertising is part of our lives, our culture, and a serious part of how our economy continues to function. Actively opting out of advertising exposure, without doing something yourself, is removing one side of the bargain in commercial situations. It’s like shoplifting. If you want something from the other party, you gotta do your own part.
If TV companies want to keep running shows like The Simpsons, Doctor Who, or whatever, they either need to make money with advertising, taxes (like the BBC does), or charge a premium subscription (a la HBO). If enough people fail to watch the ads, their efficiency drops, and then suddenly you’ve gotta pay more to watch the TV you like. It’s a bit like not voting.. if everyone stopped voting, control is in the hands of the few.
Same goes for radio, Web sites, and other forms of media. If you actively censor advertising, media providers will have to resort to other ways to balance out the implicit transaction between themselves and their consumers. Those “balances” are, I feel, unacceptable.. do we really want more annoying interstital pages, lower quality content, or sites shutting down because they couldn’t make a subscription model stick? It’s no for me, although perhaps you’d like that idea.
I understand his argument, I just don’t buy it 100%.
If taken to extremes, it approaches absurdity. For example, if I mute the television during advertisements, or get up to use the toilet, make a snack, or check my email, am I “shoplifting”? If I install a pop-up blocker, am I shoplifting? If I walk into the cinema 20 minutes late and miss the ads and the previews, am I shoplifting? More importantly, if someone’s business model isn’t working, is that the consumer’s fault? I don’t think so, and I don’t think that’s what Peter intended to say, but I do think it’s the logical conclusion to that argument.
My personal view is that the point is moot; whether people agree or disagree that blocking or skipping ads (Tivo) is ethical, it is going to happen anyways: more, and more, and more. I think it will become common-place, to the point of ubiquity.
I don’t think the answer is to not use Tivo/other DVRs or not block ads, the answer is for websites and advertisers to not annoy people, not insult their intelligence, and not be obnoxious.
We all know of the ads that are so entertaining/funny/viral that they get spread around by word of mouth, and people willingly watch them and then tell all their friends to do the same.
I think advertising will have no choice but to attempt to practice that pattern; become more creative, entertaining, informative, or whatever.
We all like to laugh, to be entertained, to be informed. Nobody likes to be sold. We don’t mind being an audience, but we aren’t so taken with being a target market, a demographic unit, or a line-item in a marketing plan.
That aside, what about the ad-based business model? Good question. Well, what about the buggy-whip manufacturers? Before someone says that obsolete technology is not analogous to blocking ads, well — I don’t know about that. Technology is what makes blocking or skipping advertisements possible, and it’s no coincidence that as soon as most people are able to skip advertisements, they do.
If a business model starts to fail, do we halt what we’re doing and alter our behavior to suit that business model? By that logic, we all should have ordered stuff from Pets.com in 2000, just out of the kindness of our hearts, so they didn’t go out of business. The dot-com bust shouldn’t have happened, because we shouldn’t have let it happen, darn it! Why weren’t we there for their business model? How could we fail to support them?
No; I don’t think we should adapt to a business model. The business model adapts to the consumer, period.
If I start a business and fail to make money, I can’t go to my investors and try to tell them that my business model is fine, it’s just that the customers are not cooperating.
Again, my examples are approaching absurdity. But I think we’ve become so used to an advertising-based model that we may not see that it’s basically a one-sided contract. We never agreed, in the early days of radio and television, to watch advertisements in exchange for consuming news and entertainment — that was(is) just how it worked. To a large extent, that is still how it works, and I’m not against advertising, or that business model: not at all! In many/most cases, I think the model still works, and works well.
What I see, and what I’ve said before, is that as ad blocking/skipping becomes ubiquitous (and I still think that it will become ubiquitous), the business model will be forced to change. That’s not bad, wrong, unethical, immoral, or anything like that. It’s just change.
It may be disruptive, but, don’t we claim to like disruptive? Isn’t all innovation disruptive? Maybe not everyone sees a change in the advertising business model as “innovation”, but I’m not sure what else you’d call a change as large as the one I think is going to happen in the next ten years.
What do you think?
Here’s an idea I’d like to implement. I’m not sure yet if anyone will want to use it, but I think they might; the idea is a widget for reciprocal linking.
Picture it like a snippet of javascript that serves up a couple links, much like Adsense serves up ads. However, instead of serving a paid-for advertisement, it just shows a pair (or some other small tuple) of link to other sites. You don’t earn any money for showing these links, instead you simply have your site in the queue as well, and it will be listed on the other sites in the network. Essentially, you’re exchanging links, but with out the cumbersome need to make individual arrangements — and you could potentially link to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of other sites, without actually having a static list of a 100,000 links somewhere on your site.
Reciprocal links really means you’re providing a potential stream of traffic to others in exchange for receiving potential traffic yourself. The reason you want this traffic is immaterial; whether you want more people to view your ads, or whether you want to change the world and need more people to hear your ideas — all that is irrelevant to the system. All it does is serve links.
The system of serving links would be evenly distributed. Say, for example, the service was live and 100,000 sites had joined. Each puts a javascript snippet somewhere on their page which displays two links to member sites. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that the average number of page impressions per site is 1000/day. Some may be far higher, many will be far lower. Regardless, that would mean that the network of sites displays 200 million links per day, or that each member site would have 2,000 links a day showing, somewhere on the network. This is assuming that links change with each page impression, and that after each link has appeared once it returns to the end of the queue, waiting to appear again.
Basically, something like this would be free reciprocal advertising. If you run ads, the benefit could be more traffic ergo more revenue; if you don’t, more traffic ergo more people are seeing what you’re doing. Assuming that you’re writing or creating something cool that you want to share, that might be all you want.
I sort of like the idea. Low overhead, simple, no complicated ranking algorithms, win-win scenario for anyone who joins the network. It would be a moderately simple application to build, which means that anyone could replicate it without much trouble. But, so what? I’m going to try to have something like this built this winter, just to see how it will work, and to gauge interest.
If this sort of simple non-advertising advertising sounds intriguing to you, please leave a comment; thanks!
I’m not sure I’m very good at predicting the Next Big Thing. I mean, when I first heard about Microsoft Windows in 1990, I figured that would be a complete flop*. Yeah. So, there you go.
(* But really, who could blame me?)
Still, I think we can be assured that there will be, at some point, another Next Big Thing. It’s just the actual shape and smell of it that eludes us.
I don’t know if the Metaweb will be the Next Big Thing. But if it isn’t, I think it may be the Next Next Big Thing, or possibly the 3.times(”Next”) Big Thing, or maybe somewhere beyond that. I don’t even know if we’ll call it “the Metaweb”, but at the moment, I don’t know what else to call it.
When I say “Metaweb”, then, what am I talking about? Mainly, I mean a layer of activity and content over the web, interdependent with existing web content. Some possible examples:
Continue reading ‘The Metaweb’
I want to talk about why I decided to remove the advertisements from this page.
Interestingly, just today I see that Garrick Van Buren posted something related to some of my recent thoughts: Say When. He says:
A friendly reminder that readers, viewers, fans, etc aren’t the people pushing and demanding advertisements.
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and I decided today to remove the ads from this website. I think I’ll probably write more about this later. For now… bye, AdSense.
From the Gmail Greasemonkey 1.0 API page, emphasis added:
Greasemonkey is an integral part of the web experience for many experienced users. Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place, another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail, and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs).
The news about Gmail and Greasemonkey is cool and interesting, but what I found most interesting was the emphasized statement above.
When I wrote a week or two ago that I didn’t think an Ad-driven business model could last forever, I think a lot of people probably thought that was crazy. After all, don’t we read articles about blogs, sites, and businesses making hundreds of thousands of dollars, per month, with online advertising?
Absolutely; and I think those sites and business models will continue to work. Probably they’ll even do so for the next few years, even the next decade (maybe). But Google’s acknowledgment above is at the heart of what I was trying to say:
We, the web publisher, have NO CONTROL over how the browser views our site.
It’s conceivable that anyone, via their browser, plugins like Greasemonkey, other addons, or yet other technologies and methods unforeseen, can ignore or over-ride our CSS, our carefully tested layouts, any and all widgets on the page, anything.
Yes, right now it’s a very small percentage of rather geeky folks who are using Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey, etc, to do this, but we have no reason to suppose that it will remain this esoteric in the future. It could become easy as one-click, in many more browsers, to remove ads from web pages. What then?
Again, the sky is not falling, no one is going to stop making money, and this business model isn’t going to fall apart overnight. I’m just not sure it’s The One True Business Model that will continue to work in perpetuity…
—
Back to Gmail & Greasemonkey. Again, this is cool. Anyone found or created greasemonkey scripts for this yet?
From Wladimir Palant (AdsensePlus’ developer)’s blog:
Do you think there will be technological solutions to prevent Adblock Plus from working?
I doubt anything can make Adblock Plus entirely unusable. However, Adblock Plus has a very distinct technological limit. Blocking every single ad on the Internet requires too much effort — which is why I think that over time we will reach a balance where only the annoying advertisements will be blocked by filter lists like EasyList. The others would “survive” because nobody will bother blocking them. Which is a good thing, we need something to discourage advertisers from using annoying ads.
I agree completely (the whole post linked to above is interesting), and I hope that this is the eventual result of Ad-blocking extensions. Unobtrusive, non annoying ads should survive. I think they will.
Annoying “push the button/kill the samurai/look at me I’m floating across the screen over the content” ads should die a swift and un-mourned death. At least, if you asked me about it.
Also… due to thinking about this for the last day, I decided that I did want to install Adblock plus. I white-listed Google Ads and The Deck, because I want to encourage that type of advertising; everything else on the EasyList(US) is blocked.
Though Google ads can be abused, too: anyone who’s seen one of those sites with a few lines of content and three HUGE blocks of Adsense getting in the way knows what I mean. Also, I’ve heard YouTube adsense ads are now available; not sure yet what I think of that; I guess I’ll know when I see some.
UPDATE: In another post, Wladimir also links to two great articles on the topic: Adblock: Adapt or Die and Adblock Doesn’t Matter: Get Over It. From the former article a great observation:
… if you are in an ad-supported content providing business, you need to learn a little bit of economic Darwinism: “Capitalism makes no guarantees whether your business model will succeed from one day to the next. Adapt or die.”
That’s the same thing I’ve been thinking: if it doesn’t work, it’s not the site visitors who need to change, it’s the business model. Imagine trying to change your customers to suit your business model… how well is that going to work? (Answer: not very.)
Spent a moment reading this NYTimes article, Whiting Out the Ads, But at what cost?
Within the article is the revelation that some website owners actually seem to take it personally that their readers may not want to be assaulted with advertisements. There are even some, apparently, who will reroute requests from the Firefox browser to whyfirefoxisblocked.com.
The aforementioned site is what prompted me to actually start writing. My first thought is, You have got to be kidding me.
Your readers are not obligated to view your advertisements. Readers who block advertisements are not stealing, being dishonest, underhanded, sneaky, malicious, or any other such thing.
It’s not for no reason that the various sorts of web publishing are being referred to as “New Media.” They are new, and even if they are most often (right now) being used in ways that mirror old media (text, audio, video), the method of distribution makes it new.
Distribution on the web is nothing like old media. There is absolutely no guarantee that your user will see what you meticulously designed in Dreamweaver; they may have larger fonts, they may have JavaScript turned off*, they could be using their own stylesheets, they could be using Greasemonkey to alter the way a variety of sites are displayed, they could be using hoodwink.d to comment on your site behind your back. They could be using Adblock to subvert your plans of World Domination Through Superior Content Supported By Advertising.
* This is always brought up whenever a discussion of the merits or demerits of Javascript takes place. In this day of Ajax applications… does anyone, anywhere, actually turn Javascript off? I submit that anyone who does is also capable of turning it back on in a flash if they want it.
The trouble with an ad-based business model is, the visitor is under no contract to view, read, or click on your ads. Yes, you can pull out a lot of statistics that say at least a certain number of visitors will click on the ads, and at the moment I’d say that it’s still a very valid business model if you have sufficient traffic. However, it may not be a valid business model 3 years down the road.
In fact, there’s no real reason that someone couldn’t make a fork of Firefox that includes Adblock, or something like it, turned on by default. (I only say “fork” because Mozilla’s relationship with Google is such that it is very unlikely they’d do this themselves.)
To go a step further — there’s no reason (other than the inherent absurdity of the suggestion) why Microsoft or Opera couldn’t start blocking advertisements by default in their browsers. It sounds ridiculous, but take a look at Tivo. Yes, the real power feature of Tivo and any DVR is being able to watch your chosen shows whenever you want. However, in any given conversation about Tivo’s features, I guarantee you that “You can skip ads!” is mentioned as a feature. Who’s to say that it won’t be considered a major browser feature only a few short years from now?
I have a few Google ads on my site; they don’t bring in much of anything. In two years of running ads I’ve brought in one check of just over $100, one time. So — yeah. Not quitting my day job to start blogging full time any time soon. Ad income pretty much has reimbursed what I’ve paid for various domains and hosting; I’m probably breaking even (if you don’t count that I’m not paid for the time I spend designing, redesigning, maintaining, and writing).
But I don’t expect visitors to click those ads. I don’t get bent out of shape at the idea that a good portion of my visitors probably have Adblock installed, as I do on some of my machines. That’s fine.
If you really think your content is that good, then charge for it. It’s been done, it’s being done, and it will probably be done more and more in the future. But don’t get all worked up because some one (a remarkably small percentage of the online population, I believe) is choosing not to view your ads. Blocking Firefox for that reason is tantamount to networks attempting to arrange it so their shows are not watchable on Tivo.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
