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August 14, 2009

What's wrong with this Price Tag?

I'm sure that creators of ads would be amused (NOT!) to find out from media professor and consultant Jeff Jarvis that ads are not "content" !

Jarvis's stance, as reported by Stefan Deeran of BNET in the article Who Benefits from the "Link Economy", is summed up as this problem:

"In general, the consensus is that producers of original content that want to put their work behind a paywall or demand payment from linkers, just don’t get the fluidity of web."

The proof of this, they say, is that linkers prosper without paying non-ad content providers; instead, linkers get to charge the ad providers, while non-ad content providers don't get to do that.. Thus the Jarvis claim that we are shifting from a "content economy" to a "links economy".

But obviously, ads are content, and meanwhile, how many linkers actually turn a profit?

So to remain clear, the shift is about what kind of content has the most "economic" value as currency, not as net income that supports a continuation of the cash flows for non-ad content providers or linkers.

Non-ad content, now highly commoditized by the web, is most similar to currency that has suffered inflation beyond any important redemption. The "face value" has stopped being significant.

But while technology has made ad content easier to distribute, and thus magnified its face value, there is no rational proof that people suddenly prefer ads to non-ads. Instead, there is proof that ad-content providers are willing to work harder to deal with the problem of someone's "preference" than are most people willing to work on it for themselves.

As soon as non-ad content providers get people used to paid subscriptions again, the "economy" will rebalance in favor of branding, editorialism and other things that people want with non-ad content to conform to their preference.

 "Non-ad Content" providers must solve the Cost-of-Preference problem. This is already being trial-and-errored with concepts like "MyContent", "Premium Content", "Actionable Content", and so on -- and most of these approaches are long past being "new". 

But if paid "links" are simply today's version of booth rentals at a trade show, it's not the content that dissuades people from buying; rather, it's that the trade show is huge and unmanaged, so people are fatigued by it very quickly.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at August 14, 2009 5:05 PM