Talked to Boris Mann and Kris Krug today about a bunch of things. They are doing some cool stuff at bryght and have a unique but very smart approach to leveraging open source to create a service business.
At the end of our conversation, Boris started making an analogy between television networks and online ad networks. We didn't get far with the conversation. But, the way he phrased tied some things in my head together. Here it is short and sweet:
The news and entertainment industry used to be the tie that bound advertisers to consumers. The newspapers did two things: write good and trusted content and sold ads. The entertainment industry (tv + radio) did two things: created good entertainment and sold ads.
Boil it down ever further and all of these businesses do two things: deliver value to advertisers and delivered what consumers want.
The internet of course doesn't require that those two things exist in one house. There are clever companies all over the net that are figuring out millions of ways to entertain and inform and enable interaction between people (that are also consumers).
And there are thousands of companies that are trying to deliver value to (I won't call them advertisers) businesses in exchange for money. Boris mentioned a theory that there will be online ad networks like google's adsense, yahoo's business/ad services, cnet networks, job sites, rss ad networks, etc, etc. that advertisers will turn to.
What I like about the net, though, is that as soon as one company figures out how to add more value to an advertiser or entertain or inform the consumer better, the power shifts. That's cool. That's fun. That's democracy and capitalism working fluidly.
Done.
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