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May 26, 2005

RSS Enables Intermediation

Not disintermediation.  Susan Mernit and Matt McAllister have it a bit backwards. Disintermediation is when one company reroutes the supply chain so that another is no longer necessary.  Not when one technology changes the way a single company delivers their product to their customer. 

If anything, RSS is an intermediary. In fact, it is probably the best intermediary ever invented. RSS enables anyone to build cool applications on top of other people's information and applications, increasing the value of the original information and application.

I have a series of posts I've been working on, where I will write how the following technologies and players will continue to intermediate the ad industry:

- Publishing systems like TypePad to wordpress to Spurl to Flickr to WhizSpark.
- New groups of publishers like creative weblogging and fringe network and lone bloggers with a keyboard, that some call "Consumer Generated Media Producers".
- Aggregators. Not just bloglines and newsgator.
- Search companies
- Discovery sites like Findory, blogpulse, EVDB and zniff which will evolve into implicit networking sites.
- Community websites like forums to myspace.
- Ad technology companies that leverage all these outlets as points to reach the consumer and the direct marketing capabilities of the web.

The very definition of online advertising may be that it is always being intermediated. Until, of course, it is all pay per action. Then, it'll be a price war commodity that we'll be trading on some exchange somewhere: Futures for Advertising.

Come to think of it, that is probably why advertising is so interesting to me. There is always somebody with a better system.

Posted at 04:25 PM |

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