I’ve Said Too Much

UK online ad revenues went mad last year, according to the Advertising Association (via journalism.co.uk):

The latest figures from the Advertising Association show that the amount of money spent on UK internet advertising rose by a staggering 73.1 per cent from 2004 to 2005.

In contrast, national newspaper advertising spend fell by 3 per cent and for regional papers by 4.4 per cent. Online advertising now represents a larger share of the UK market than consumer and business magazines, outdoor, cinema and radio advertising.

Total online advertising spend was estimated at £1.131 million for 2005 - £748 million from classified advertising and £383 million from display, such as banners and button adverts.

Overall spend on advertising for all media was £15.973 million, showing 2.1 per cent growth from 2004.

Interesting that overall ad spend should have grown so little. Is there a finite amount of ad spend in the UK market, and are we near it?

There’s plainly a great idea hiding in Microsoft’s search macros, but boy, have they hid it behind some confusing text. For instance:

2. Make a macro

Next is the macro creation screen. Macros have several components: a name, the default scope (Web results vs. News results), a description and a definition. The definition is where you define the advanced operators for your macro. For example, livesearch.recipes that we’ve been talking about has the following definition:

(-site:toeatgoodfood.com -linkdomain:googlesyndication.com intitle:recipe prefer:cup prefer:serve prefer:cook prefer:food prefer:menu prefer:cookbook prefer:site:www.epicurious.com prefer:site:www.recipesource.com prefer:site:allrecipes.com prefer:site:www.foodtv.com prefer:site:www.recipesource.com)

It uses the following operators to find good recipe sites:

site: restrict results to a single domain
prefer: reorder the results preferring this term
linkdomain: finds results that link to a page on a domain
“-” exclude pages that meet this criteria

Got that? Thought not. Wouldn’t some kind of simple tool have been a great way to show the power of this? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great idea. But I think more people would be talking about if they could have understood it. Just calling it “macros” turned me off….

My wife, who works in education policy, just told me that the new education frameworks for England and Wales - the stuff which guides what teachers do in their classrooms - will not be printed in paper form for the first time. They’ll only be available on CD or online.

This is interesting, she said, because even three years ago this would have been impossible - teachers would have refused to countenance it, because they would still perceived themselves as being “offline”. Today, with far more computers in classrooms, not to mention interactive whiteboards and top-end projectors, technology is a day-to-day feature, and the announcement that the new frameworks will be paper-free has so far passed with barely a mention.

Her point, and the reason for this post, is this: “technology is only transforming when people are so used to the technology that they’re unaware of being part of a transformation.” The really significant revolutions happen when everyone’s looking the other way.

Well, it’s been very quiet around here, but let’s kick things off again with an insightful post from from my ex-boss on the subject of content providers and aggregators, and the fact that economic value isn’t flowing from one to another in a consistent, logical way:

What we need is a swift, easy and unpunitive licensing structure to allow content creators to distribute content; and for aggregators to aggregate - with value to each fairly represented.

Unworkable? Well, actually, this model has been cracked before. It’s how record labels deal with radio stations - through a centralised rights agency. If we start to think of our stories as songs, our feeds as albums, and the new wave of aggregators as radio stations, you can sort of see how it makes sense. And, yes, it all started out in exactly the same “we need you more than you need us” kind of way - and has matured. Yes, people will still jockey for position, but the underlying commercial relationship is taken care of elsewhere.

Simon goes on to fairly outline the possible objections to this model, but I fear he misses an obvious one: the reason these aggregation services are springing up is the presence of a standard, RSS, which makes it easy for anyone - an individual or a company - to take content from someone supplying a feed and do things with it. Any amount of terms of service isn’t going to stop that single fact: if content is made available in a standard, people will do things with it. The radio licensing model depended on there being scarcity of spectrum, meaning scarcity of outlets, meaning the possibility of some kind of regulation or policing of the environment. No such scarcity exists online.

Which isn’t to say Simon’s idea won’t fly - in lots of ways, it’s the only way this is going to work for content providers and aggregators. But until we deal with this “problem” of open standards and lack of scarcity, any model based on licensing and policing is going to be really hard to implement.

Things are going to be quiet round here for a while. I’m in my last week at the Guardian, and blogging just doesn’t seem appropriate or responsible right now. More soon when I’m ensconced at Yahoo! Europe. Cheers for now.

Nice quote from Tom Glocer of Reuters via Jeff Jarvis:

If the user wants to be both author and editor, and technology is increasingly enabling this, what will be the role of the media company? He has three answers: Media companies will be a “seeder of clouds.” Nice analogy. I call it a magnet and would recommend that to him for he says that just creating content is not enough; they must attract the people. The second role is to be a “provider of tools - We need to produce open standards and interoperability to allow disparate people to create content of disparate types. Let’s not make the same mistakes newspapers did with the protectionist online strategies that characterized Internet 1.” By that he means not recreating the old content in the new medium. The third role, he says, is that media companies will be “filter and editor.” He says that “the good stuff will rise to the top” online.

Presumably, Glocer is at least implying that the good stuff will only rise to the top with the help of good editing. So, seeder of clouds, provider of tools, filter and editor: the Thoroughly Modern Media Company.