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It seems and sounds
that I was angry. And I was, and I am, and we should!
We should be angry about ourselves because
we letting us be used without compensation. We need to change our views.
Following that we need to change our policies and practices. What we have
to recognize is that click through is ineffective from the viewpoint of
the publisher, that is us, small and medium entities on the internet. We
are wasting our time programming our pages with the unpaid ads of bigger
or large companies. It is not useless to the advertiser, its highly
cost effective; its almost for free! It functions for the advertiser just
like newspaper, magazine or poster billboard advertisement, the kind he
has to pay greatly for. Only this kind is on the condition of resulting
sales or at least used to enter their store. That condition is one we should
not anymore agree to. Could they get this kind of deal on Madison Ave?
Its does not do anything for us. The time for that kind of revenue creation
is over.
I like to go a little deeper into the
reasons why.
There are several developments concerning
on line behavior of the surfing masses. First the increased experience
of the public. The number of novice surfers relative to the the existing
crowd becomes smaller as time goes on toward and during temporary saturation.
That is also part of why the box makers have a hard time to sell their
product.
The increasing sophistication of the surfer
who has to deal with the info overload and thus becomes more selective
of what he or she clicks on. This devalues banner ads to the function of
a brand - recognition - saturation tool. The advertisement market is down
for large sites, as is said the stock value of for example Yahoo and other
on advertisement depending companies indicates, because the client does
not get the result from his on line ads anymore and is thus not willing
to pay the same high price for new contract periods. Because of the diminished
result of internet advertisement, companies have to find other ways to
promote their products or services. That is why the email advertisement
has taken off to the flight it has.
The downturn of the economy is part of
the equation. The public has become less eager to spend their dollars,
except for the perceived essentials and this will continue to better times
can be reached. This is depending on one great unknown variable: When will
the venture financiers find the new "thing" to make them risk their capital
and will they ever, like in the past dot-com boom?
An other reason is that large well established
and trusted operations have become the gates to the shoppers promised land.
If you are on AOL, you don't have to go anywhere; as a matter of fact,
you are not going any where anyway; you are not even really on the internet.
They are the ISP; your phone line and modem are directly connecting to
them and that is it. It's all there. All the shops, services. Only for
the porn they got to get out of there. MSN the same. With Amazon, Yahoo,
etc.. you are at least on the internet. However all these for mentioned
entities, relatively monopolize the gates to shoppers heaven. Our position
should be: why should we be the worm holes leading to these black holes
of commerce?
What should we do?
To all singularities, we have to become
black holes ourselves. How do we increase gravity forces? Just like the
biggies do: fusing. At least make alliances. Promote each other. No unpaid
ads for the existing black holes. We have to concentrate on what unique
content we can offer, and accordingly make the alliances. Cross pollination.
Exchange only: ads and links, even content with reference to source. No
funneling anymore to the mammoths. They take care for themselves with multiple
channels at their command: TV, printed media, DB's for email ads, etc.
Let me know what we can do for each other. |
