What If Media 2.0 Is Less Profitable Than Media 1.0?
The advent of web-based e-commerce fundamentally lowered the costs of doing business, increasing the scalability (and in many cases the viability) of thousands of small businesses. The introduction of micro-marketing through Google AdWords gave a huge jolt to this trend, making marketing scalable and profitable for these same small businesses. Two companies — Google and eBay — have been the principal beneficiaries of this trend. As consumers spend more and more of their media time online, ad dollars have been pouring into online media — the assumption has been that the billions of dollars that large companies spend on mass media advertising and marketing (i.e. TV ads) will ultimately follow the small company dollars online. If this assumption is correct, websites with the greatest command of online consumer attention, e.g. MySpace, will be the beneficiaries of this 1-to-1 transfer of marketing and advertising dollars to digital media. But what if there’s a fatal flaw in this assumption
