There is a piece here that remains missing that needs to be kept in mind if we're going to claim this kind of approach, that authors are selling the content of their writing -- if that's the case, much of what they are selling isn't theirs.
When was the last time someone writing an Oedipal story sent off a royalty to Sophocles? Someone retelling the story of Romeo and Juliet sending one to Shakespeare (or Ovid or...)? Heck, Heinlein invented the idea of waterbeds and never got a dime of royalty -- never even slept in one. The words authors use are things they didn't create. The literary conventions they use to express their stories with are not of their own creation either, and many of the stories they tell were old long before they were born, just to be reworked and rehandled later.
Storytelling is a fine art, regardless of the medium used, and there are some who are very gifted at it, and some of us are willing to spend some of our surplus money to buy copies of their stories for a value they have to us. Some stories I'm interested in, but not to the point that I would pay cover price even for a paperback copy. However, I've found stories in books that I've picked up for free that I've liked enough to buy others by the same author, and have recommended the authors to friends who have also bought books by them also. The authors and their publishers continue to benefit from the transaction even though they received nothing directly from it.
I think this concept of intellectual property needs some refining. Unless we are willing to acknowledge our intellectual debt to those who have gone before us (whether still living or not) with the same level and kind of compensation we are expecting others to provide us, we have created a very one-sided situation which will ultimately prove untenable. Far too much of our intellectual property is -- in effect, stolen merchandise.
More hits can generate more sales at some points, and, at some points, more hits won't generate any more sales. A million hits on a site that sells a product no one wants will get no sales, and a thousand hits on a site that sells a product most people want at a good price will generate more sales. There is a point of saturation.
And that's really the most important point -- advertising has limits in what it can produce, and it's very wise to be realistic about what those limitations are on a case-by-case basis. Pushier web advertising, like pushier sales techniques, may work at one level by making it harder for individuals to turn you down, but it will do so at a price which could include reducing the number of people who will even look at it.
I definitely agree with this. Marketing someone else's product next to yours makes no sense to me. And this is what I think needs more consideration in advertising decisions -- consider the experience of the browser, and design your experience accordingly.
Throughout my time on the net, it has seemed that the functional quid pro quo has been of a rather dynamic and loosely defined nature -- you contribute to the whole, and, if everybody contributes something, there's something for everybody. That works pretty well, imo. Businesses that provide things of value on the net are more likely to see people patronize the business because they are liked. People spend their time and money doing things they value, and that includes supporting people and causes they like.
But that kind of an arrangement takes patience, and doesn't necessarily justify the financial commitments businesses have been making the past few years. The idea that going on the net is the way to get rich ignores many of those basics I was talking about, and have resulted from people who either know the net, but don't know business, or from people who know business, but not the net.
I agree heavily with the greater problem of hypermarketing, and think it's eventually going to cause a crash of the whole advertising/marketing world on the scale of a stock market crash. The push-push-push approach is wearing on people, and they are going to start pushing back (and I would encourage them to do so). I don't know the nature of that change or the solution, but I see it coming and I think it will bring good things.
Keep in mind here the number of web-based businesses that have gone belly-up because they couldn't be profitable. I'm not sure that banner advertising is significantly helpful -- I've found the few commercial sites I've bought things from by hearing them mentioned someplace, through an existing commercial relationship, or through a search engine. That's about it.
That money has been thrown at it in large amounts means little in this regard -- how many millions of dollars have been invested in.coms that have gone belly up or failed to produce a dollar of profit and have no prospects even yet?
I'm increasingly struck by the paradox that the net would never have been created by a commercial interest, the protocols necessary to do all of these wonderful things including the web would never have been created by a commercial interest, and yet there is so much money getting passed around through this that it's incredible.
Advertising is very tricky stuff, and it's easy to let the technicals get in the way of the underlying principles. The purpose of advertising is to help a business (or other interest) reach their intended market with information on why their goods or services will be of value to members of that market. For this to be effective, you have to:
advertise where your market is
advertise in a fashion which will get their attention
be more likely to turn them toward your product/service than away from your product or service
(hopefully) provide them with sufficient information to make an informed decision about your product or service
Targeting an ad can be very difficult, and sometimes the placement of the ad can not only destroy the positive value of the ad -- it can make it negative. Examples that come to mind of unwise placements include beer commercials in the middle of a Mormon Christmas Special (not to say that non-Mormons wouldn't be watching it, but, still, you're hitting a market that's largely uninterested in your product -- a football game would be better), or ads for feminine hygiene products during the Super Bowl (which has happened).
Different media have a different nature when used for advertising. Print media have the options of display ads distributed through the content of the magazine or newspaper, or classified ads that are less expensive, more dense, and easier to search if you're seeking a specific kind of product or service, all of which are easily ignored by a determined reader, yet which can be very effective at putting the information you need in the hands of your potential market. Radio and TV ads replace the content of the station which are broadcasting them, providing a higher chance of attention to a given ad than in print, but facing hard limits on how much advertising can be done on a specific station.
The web is a different kind of place. It is inherently non-linear and unorganized (although it can be linearized in places, and is also organizable to some degree). Advertising models based in print have proven more applicable than radio/tv ads, because the web remains inherently a text/document based medium (albeit hypertext). Trying to ignore that nature isn't likely to prove all that effective -- in part, because of the technical work arounds which would inevitably pop up, and which are already being discussed around here.
I think it'd be helpful if web advertisers reviewed exactly what they're trying to accomplish in their advertising, and get more realistic about what is likely to happen. Putting an ad on a popular site isn't necessarily going to result in a boatload of hits from people in your potential market. And hits don't always turn into sales by any kind of linear relationship (where more hits means necessarily more sales). Ultimately, you have to view each advertisement as an opportunity, and you'll have to have a way to determine whether the cost of that opportunity is justified by its yeild or not. Very basic stuff, but it seems to be missing in the "put up an ad and get rich" expectations people are having.
The web is not inherently about business or business opportunities. It's about sharing information, some of which will be about business and products and services, and it's based in the idea of freedom for the web user. When people find that they can't get what they want on the web without having to go through advertising they don't wish to see, they will stop coming, and the value of the web will diminish. This is a goose laying golden eggs, friends -- let's please not kill it.
I've been disappointed in all of the conversations on Napster that I've seen because they all have left out the key to Napster's legal argument on their service -- under the Home Recording Act (of 1994?) record companies receive a portion of the sale price of blank tapes and cds to compensate them for loss of revenue due to home recording and that home recording and sharing of music is okay as long as it's not done for profit. Therefor, each of the file sharings done through Napster is not an infringement, and, therefor, the sharing done in aggregate isn't an infringement either.
This is key to the understanding of the situation, and adds to the point being well made here -- the record companies are gaining from this experience, and the people sharing the music aren't stealing anything. Big label big name bands benefit because more people buy their CDs. Small (or no) label unheard of bands get exposure to an audience all over the world when they may not be able to get bar gigs out of town, and this can create sufficient demand to give them a chance at success they might not have had otherwise. Everybody's winning here, so why are we using legalities to try to strangle the fowl that keeps leaving those gold eggs behind? Because of the drive for hypermarketing, and the fear that failing to take every possible marketing idea will leave everybody behind.
What is hypermarketing? Hypermarketing is filling every available space with advertising. It's not just newspapers, TV and radio anymore (and billboards, and fliers, and business cards and bulletin boards). It's:
the carts at the grocery store,
the little monitors by the register at the corner store,
the billboards on the sides of busses,
being asked by your waitress at Denny's if you want Minute Maid >tm< Orange Juice,
getting Bruce Willis to drink your beer before shooting bad guys in his next film,
being pushed by your cashier to sign up for an affinity card or credit card every time you make a purchase,
being buried in jumk mail (snailmail and email) to buy everything imaginable (whether real or not),
getting phone solicitation calls all hours of the day or night hawking windshields and siding and political candidates,
mouse-pads,
ballpoint pens,
toys,
little yard signs popping up everyplace, and
increasingly pushy banner ads and pop-ups on websites.
Wherever you go, wherever you look, the only thing more prevalent than government involvement is some little ad popping up trying to sell you something.
Much of the advertising is from new small businesses trying to get their name out and get started -- I've been there, and I'm still there, and I'll be looking for new ways to market my new service shortly. I have some sympathy with these folks, because it's extremely hard to survive long enough that anybody knows what you're doing and that you're good at it if you are. But something critical to keep in mind with this is that targeting your message is harder than blanketing, but it will pay off in this way: People are getting tired of being hypermarketed. Speaking just for me, I don't buy from spammers and I don't buy from phone solicitors, because I don't want to encourage people to spam or phone solicit, and there are other forms of advertising which I will boycott a business for -- I don't make a big deal of it most of the time, but I just don't go there, even if I would otherwise.
But most of the money in advertising comes from very large businesses with established products and services, which pretty much everybody already knows about, and most of the advertising isn't about the merits of their product. Cola commercials, beer commercials, logos popping up all over the place for products and services are there to build brand, so that you will go look for products from this company or that store, rather than, I don't know, decide based on merits or price. Has anybody decided to move from Coke to Pepsi or vice versa based on any marketing paid for by either company?
Hopefully we're close to the end of the pendulum swing toward hypermarketing, and people will begin to target their messages and to be more reasonable about their expectations from their advertising. Hopefully we can get companies to stop trying to grab every possible dime they can grab from their customers, and treat them with some respect again. Maybe we can see a tidal turn away from monolithic record companies and mass media telling us what we do and don't like and toward more of a connection between artist and audience where people can bypass the expenses of producing, marketing, packaging and distributing music if they desire and pass their compensation directly to the artists. This may (but that's not a certainty) result in some loss of jobs for people in the production, marketing, packaging and distribution of music, but that's a natural economic evolution, no more to be avoided than the death of the buggy-whip and bridle industry was a century ago.
Napster is yet another support of the principle of the internet -- great things can be created when many people are willing to share things together much more quickly than if people are trying to sell something and make a buck, and people can make quite a few bucks along the way if they are smart and know how to pick their battles. This is a battle for the record companies to walk away from. They're making money on the status quo they wouldn't make otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a piece here that remains missing that needs to be kept in mind if we're going to claim this kind of approach, that authors are selling the content of their writing -- if that's the case, much of what they are selling isn't theirs.
When was the last time someone writing an Oedipal story sent off a royalty to Sophocles? Someone retelling the story of Romeo and Juliet sending one to Shakespeare (or Ovid or ...)? Heck, Heinlein invented the idea of waterbeds and never got a dime of royalty -- never even slept in one. The words authors use are things they didn't create. The literary conventions they use to express their stories with are not of their own creation either, and many of the stories they tell were old long before they were born, just to be reworked and rehandled later.
Storytelling is a fine art, regardless of the medium used, and there are some who are very gifted at it, and some of us are willing to spend some of our surplus money to buy copies of their stories for a value they have to us. Some stories I'm interested in, but not to the point that I would pay cover price even for a paperback copy. However, I've found stories in books that I've picked up for free that I've liked enough to buy others by the same author, and have recommended the authors to friends who have also bought books by them also. The authors and their publishers continue to benefit from the transaction even though they received nothing directly from it.
I think this concept of intellectual property needs some refining. Unless we are willing to acknowledge our intellectual debt to those who have gone before us (whether still living or not) with the same level and kind of compensation we are expecting others to provide us, we have created a very one-sided situation which will ultimately prove untenable. Far too much of our intellectual property is -- in effect, stolen merchandise.
More hits can generate more sales at some points, and, at some points, more hits won't generate any more sales. A million hits on a site that sells a product no one wants will get no sales, and a thousand hits on a site that sells a product most people want at a good price will generate more sales. There is a point of saturation.
And that's really the most important point -- advertising has limits in what it can produce, and it's very wise to be realistic about what those limitations are on a case-by-case basis. Pushier web advertising, like pushier sales techniques, may work at one level by making it harder for individuals to turn you down, but it will do so at a price which could include reducing the number of people who will even look at it.
I definitely agree with this. Marketing someone else's product next to yours makes no sense to me. And this is what I think needs more consideration in advertising decisions -- consider the experience of the browser, and design your experience accordingly.
Throughout my time on the net, it has seemed that the functional quid pro quo has been of a rather dynamic and loosely defined nature -- you contribute to the whole, and, if everybody contributes something, there's something for everybody. That works pretty well, imo. Businesses that provide things of value on the net are more likely to see people patronize the business because they are liked. People spend their time and money doing things they value, and that includes supporting people and causes they like.
But that kind of an arrangement takes patience, and doesn't necessarily justify the financial commitments businesses have been making the past few years. The idea that going on the net is the way to get rich ignores many of those basics I was talking about, and have resulted from people who either know the net, but don't know business, or from people who know business, but not the net.
I agree heavily with the greater problem of hypermarketing, and think it's eventually going to cause a crash of the whole advertising/marketing world on the scale of a stock market crash. The push-push-push approach is wearing on people, and they are going to start pushing back (and I would encourage them to do so). I don't know the nature of that change or the solution, but I see it coming and I think it will bring good things.
Keep in mind here the number of web-based businesses that have gone belly-up because they couldn't be profitable. I'm not sure that banner advertising is significantly helpful -- I've found the few commercial sites I've bought things from by hearing them mentioned someplace, through an existing commercial relationship, or through a search engine. That's about it.
That money has been thrown at it in large amounts means little in this regard -- how many millions of dollars have been invested in .coms that have gone belly up or failed to produce a dollar of profit and have no prospects even yet?
I'm increasingly struck by the paradox that the net would never have been created by a commercial interest, the protocols necessary to do all of these wonderful things including the web would never have been created by a commercial interest, and yet there is so much money getting passed around through this that it's incredible.
Advertising is very tricky stuff, and it's easy to let the technicals get in the way of the underlying principles. The purpose of advertising is to help a business (or other interest) reach their intended market with information on why their goods or services will be of value to members of that market. For this to be effective, you have to:
Targeting an ad can be very difficult, and sometimes the placement of the ad can not only destroy the positive value of the ad -- it can make it negative. Examples that come to mind of unwise placements include beer commercials in the middle of a Mormon Christmas Special (not to say that non-Mormons wouldn't be watching it, but, still, you're hitting a market that's largely uninterested in your product -- a football game would be better), or ads for feminine hygiene products during the Super Bowl (which has happened).
Different media have a different nature when used for advertising. Print media have the options of display ads distributed through the content of the magazine or newspaper, or classified ads that are less expensive, more dense, and easier to search if you're seeking a specific kind of product or service, all of which are easily ignored by a determined reader, yet which can be very effective at putting the information you need in the hands of your potential market. Radio and TV ads replace the content of the station which are broadcasting them, providing a higher chance of attention to a given ad than in print, but facing hard limits on how much advertising can be done on a specific station.
The web is a different kind of place. It is inherently non-linear and unorganized (although it can be linearized in places, and is also organizable to some degree). Advertising models based in print have proven more applicable than radio/tv ads, because the web remains inherently a text/document based medium (albeit hypertext). Trying to ignore that nature isn't likely to prove all that effective -- in part, because of the technical work arounds which would inevitably pop up, and which are already being discussed around here.
I think it'd be helpful if web advertisers reviewed exactly what they're trying to accomplish in their advertising, and get more realistic about what is likely to happen. Putting an ad on a popular site isn't necessarily going to result in a boatload of hits from people in your potential market. And hits don't always turn into sales by any kind of linear relationship (where more hits means necessarily more sales). Ultimately, you have to view each advertisement as an opportunity, and you'll have to have a way to determine whether the cost of that opportunity is justified by its yeild or not. Very basic stuff, but it seems to be missing in the "put up an ad and get rich" expectations people are having.
The web is not inherently about business or business opportunities. It's about sharing information, some of which will be about business and products and services, and it's based in the idea of freedom for the web user. When people find that they can't get what they want on the web without having to go through advertising they don't wish to see, they will stop coming, and the value of the web will diminish. This is a goose laying golden eggs, friends -- let's please not kill it.
I've been disappointed in all of the conversations on Napster that I've seen because they all have left out the key to Napster's legal argument on their service -- under the Home Recording Act (of 1994?) record companies receive a portion of the sale price of blank tapes and cds to compensate them for loss of revenue due to home recording and that home recording and sharing of music is okay as long as it's not done for profit. Therefor, each of the file sharings done through Napster is not an infringement, and, therefor, the sharing done in aggregate isn't an infringement either.
This is key to the understanding of the situation, and adds to the point being well made here -- the record companies are gaining from this experience, and the people sharing the music aren't stealing anything. Big label big name bands benefit because more people buy their CDs. Small (or no) label unheard of bands get exposure to an audience all over the world when they may not be able to get bar gigs out of town, and this can create sufficient demand to give them a chance at success they might not have had otherwise. Everybody's winning here, so why are we using legalities to try to strangle the fowl that keeps leaving those gold eggs behind? Because of the drive for hypermarketing, and the fear that failing to take every possible marketing idea will leave everybody behind.
What is hypermarketing? Hypermarketing is filling every available space with advertising. It's not just newspapers, TV and radio anymore (and billboards, and fliers, and business cards and bulletin boards). It's:
- the carts at the grocery store,
- the little monitors by the register at the corner store,
- the billboards on the sides of busses,
- being asked by your waitress at Denny's if you want Minute Maid >tm< Orange Juice,
- getting Bruce Willis to drink your beer before shooting bad guys in his next film,
- being pushed by your cashier to sign up for an affinity card or credit card every time you make a purchase,
- being buried in jumk mail (snailmail and email) to buy everything imaginable (whether real or not),
- getting phone solicitation calls all hours of the day or night hawking windshields and siding and political candidates,
- mouse-pads,
- ballpoint pens,
- toys,
- little yard signs popping up everyplace, and
- increasingly pushy banner ads and pop-ups on websites.
Wherever you go, wherever you look, the only thing more prevalent than government involvement is some little ad popping up trying to sell you something.Much of the advertising is from new small businesses trying to get their name out and get started -- I've been there, and I'm still there, and I'll be looking for new ways to market my new service shortly. I have some sympathy with these folks, because it's extremely hard to survive long enough that anybody knows what you're doing and that you're good at it if you are. But something critical to keep in mind with this is that targeting your message is harder than blanketing, but it will pay off in this way: People are getting tired of being hypermarketed. Speaking just for me, I don't buy from spammers and I don't buy from phone solicitors, because I don't want to encourage people to spam or phone solicit, and there are other forms of advertising which I will boycott a business for -- I don't make a big deal of it most of the time, but I just don't go there, even if I would otherwise.
But most of the money in advertising comes from very large businesses with established products and services, which pretty much everybody already knows about, and most of the advertising isn't about the merits of their product. Cola commercials, beer commercials, logos popping up all over the place for products and services are there to build brand, so that you will go look for products from this company or that store, rather than, I don't know, decide based on merits or price. Has anybody decided to move from Coke to Pepsi or vice versa based on any marketing paid for by either company?
Hopefully we're close to the end of the pendulum swing toward hypermarketing, and people will begin to target their messages and to be more reasonable about their expectations from their advertising. Hopefully we can get companies to stop trying to grab every possible dime they can grab from their customers, and treat them with some respect again. Maybe we can see a tidal turn away from monolithic record companies and mass media telling us what we do and don't like and toward more of a connection between artist and audience where people can bypass the expenses of producing, marketing, packaging and distributing music if they desire and pass their compensation directly to the artists. This may (but that's not a certainty) result in some loss of jobs for people in the production, marketing, packaging and distribution of music, but that's a natural economic evolution, no more to be avoided than the death of the buggy-whip and bridle industry was a century ago.
Napster is yet another support of the principle of the internet -- great things can be created when many people are willing to share things together much more quickly than if people are trying to sell something and make a buck, and people can make quite a few bucks along the way if they are smart and know how to pick their battles. This is a battle for the record companies to walk away from. They're making money on the status quo they wouldn't make otherwise.