What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [29]
Advertising’s absurd mass-media economics have spilled over to online. I shrieked when Advertising Age reported that agencies were complaining of a shortage of ad inventory on the home pages of portals including Yahoo. The agencies were creating a false scarcity. There is no end of unsold ad inventory on billions of pages all over the internet. Many of those pages are far better targeted to their needs and would be cheaper and more efficient than Yahoo’s home page. Besides, it’s not as if a given advertiser’s message is going to be seen by everyone who comes to Yahoo, as not everyone goes to its home page. In print and broadcast, advertisers pay for the entire audience—everyone who reads a magazine is presumed to see every ad. Online, advertisers pay only for the pages on which their ads appear—or, with Google’s AdSense, they pay only when a reader clicks on an ad. The internet is a more economical and measurable advertising medium but its efficiency is not in agencies’ interest because, remember, the more they spend, the more they earn.
Is there any scarcity left in media? Some argue that our attention is shrinking, but I don’t buy that. My attention is constant—I have 24 hours in a day, 18 of them awake and 17 of those sober. I choose what to pay attention to in those hours. I believe my attention is more efficient and spent on greater quality than ever, now that I have more choice and more control over my time. Some argue that trust is scarce. Well, I suppose that’s always true, but I now have more sources for news than I have ever had—not just my local newspaper but The Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, bloggers I respect, and more. Is quality still scarce? Yes, of course, but the more content that is made, the more opportunities there are for more people to make good content. The challenge is sifting through it all to find that good stuff. Where we see challenges, Googlethink teaches us to look for opportunities. Businesses can be built on the need for sifting: commerce sites that find the best merchandise, news sites that read so we don’t have to, and entertainment services that gather the critical opinions of the crowd. The internet kills scarcity and creates opportunities in abundance.
Google has found a business model based on creating, exploiting, and managing abundance: The more content there is for it to organize and the more places there are for it to place its ads, the better. If your business is built on scarcity—and most are—you need to ask how you, too, can manage and exploit abundance.
Join the open-source, gift economy
Many a mogul has marveled at the wonder of the open-source economy. The story is often told: Distributed armies of programmers created the most important software underlying the internet, from the Linux operating system that powers most internet servers to the free Apache web server software that delivers most web pages to the 500 million open-source Firefox browsers that show those pages.
Why do these programmers do this work for free? Because they’re generous. They want to be part of something. They care. They may want to stick it to the man (namely, Mr. Gates). And they know that banding together in an open network lets them create a better product than they could if they were to work inside most corporations.
How is open-source not chaos? New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen studied the Firefox project when he wanted to bring similar collaboration to journalism at his NewAssignment.net project. He learned that contrary to common misperception, open-source projects are not anarchies. They have leadership and