Posts from — January 2009

Dave Chase leaves us his approach on declining local media businesses:

1 – Sales teams more oriented to account management than to new customers´acquisition.

2 – Lack of competence to reach advertisers that are not buying ad space. Lack of capacity to manage scalable sales strategies (tele-sales).

3 – Not having capacity to explain ROI measurements to potential advertisers.

4 – The atempt to sale many small ad placements instead of a few big placements.

5 – The fact that you sell advertising and the advertiser rarely see his own ads in the site.

creating scarcity by only allowing a certain number of advertisers in a particular section

This post entry is an interesting explanation.  I agree in all points while I would put some arguments in a different way. His most powerful reason, and the one is making ad-space a kind of commodity that we sell by tons is that lack of scarcity. As traffic grows, ad-space is solds  in tons of millions and we are losing a volume reference helping us much to understand what we are paying for (when buyin advertising).

Selling sections, or placements, by days, sections or sponsorhips elliminating rotating banners in most of our media, not only would create that sense of urgency and scarcity to appear but would only simplify our ad-selling process making it cheaper.

We know Google are great, and so, why to reinvent what they do? A search engine gets information for free because it’s offering a service: search. The same way they get information, you may get their service to offer again final information in a different way.

This seems to be a response to google supported by Time Warner and Jeff Bezos: kosmix. It’s a kind of Metha-aggregator that just gets the information from sources and converts it into its own information. And, what is the relevance of this?

We thought we were becoming service providers with outstanding product while taking the contents of the others, but then, someone else comes and gets your service and try to make it a commodity to finally also offering the contents of the others. Search engines converted content into commodities and new search engines are trying to convert older searching into a commodity? It seems to be a very feasible and reasonable answer. And… if search engines did not have problems getting other contents to build on their business, now they got no argument to claim someone else is using their service in order to offer another one… and they try to clean up results: no SEO influences, not such information floods in order to getting lost.

Building in existing aggregators and search engines to improve our search experience is a very reasonable next step that makes sense. At the same time, these new solutions will be improved by others getting into a (hopefully) never ending process of search improvement, but… what is more relevant: inverting again the situation and getting back search as a commodity solution, and (maybe) content will be again a king.

Kosmix is trying just to do that, and it will be a first mover into a trend: building on existing services to offer improved services.

As content structuring business get harder into improving search and fighting each other, content suppliers (media business) will have less capacity to influence their own positioning in such places. That will make, probably, that established brands and those who are at the root of the news, will get more relevance.

A fierce competition in media structuring is definitely good news for media users, and so, for media business. Welcome kosmix, and welcome to all those coming business that will use existing content structuring services to improve them.