Another Quiet Day

How Google Killed the Internet Part 2

Susan Kuchinskas wrote:

The dirty truth is, for most small publishers and bloggers, AdSense doesn’t work very well. And that’s a big problem for Google. It’s got one big, hungry mouth to feed: Wall Street. Growth has gotta come from somewhere.

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Susan writes on the future viability of Adsense in specific and contextual advertising in general.

The quotation is from part one. You should check out part two and three as well.

This is a subject I, strangely enough, care about quite a bit.

A medium needs an economy to thrive. It needs people willing to pay some good hard cash, and people willing to take that cash in exchange for making something new and interesting in the field.

For the first time in the history of new media, the non-gaming forms of interactive digital media are building up some sort of economy, primarily based on advertising.

The obligation on the practitioners is to innovate, both in terms of business models and in terms of content.

We're seeing neither at the moment—the economics are mainly online retail (think t-shirts and hardcopy books), donations, subscriptions and advertising (simplistic at that).

There is some hope in direct sales such as that with the itunes store.

For a medium to survive, its primary source of revenue needs to be in the form of sales of the medium itself.

Direct sales attach value to the works themselves, which is just as important for the evolution of the form as the revenue.

Baldur Bjarnason – 22/8/06