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Thursday, August 14, 2003 |
 Google is about to create another bubble in Web advertising. There has been a troubling recurring trend in Web advertising. It's called monetizing the margin. For a short period of time, it allows certain content owners to print money. We saw it once, and we are seeing it again.
In the first big Web advertising boom, most of the ad dollars went to the portals. This was natural: big money advertising focused on numbers of impressions and reach (breadth of audience -- learned from TV and radio land). The portals had it. Unfortunately for the advertisers, the portals also had an ability to manufacture impressions by aggregating increasingly inane inventory (Yahoo Finance discussion pages for instance). Inventory creation quickly outpaced paid placement, click-through dropped (since an ever greater number of ads were placed on the pages seen by a small number of heavy users that didn't click), and the Web advertising system broke down. They had monetized the margin.
Three years and lots of pain and suffering later, the Web advertising model has gained some IQ points. Advertisers don't want impressions anymore, they want click-throughs (for the most part, most advertisers still don't track click-throughs all the way to purchase, so they are still in the dark on how these ads are performing). This new philosophy has led advertisers to search engines to provide contextual advertisements on a per click-through basis (in the hope that better contextual information will help people click-through more often). Performance is now the watchword of the moment.
Unfortunately, the search engines have figured out how to monetize the margins of this advertising model too. There is a way to manufacture click-throughs on "contextual" content. The first step is to put advertising on weblogs that are "qualified" as contextual content through an automated mechanism of keyword analysis (Google's Adsense). A flawed mechanism if there ever was one. The second step is to trust that visitors to weblogs are very likely to click-through on Adsense text ad in order to provide, at zero cost to themselves, a small stipend to the author of the weblog. This "click to contribute" impulse will grow until the system breaks down.
We are about two years away from this collapse. During this time Google and Yahoo will profit and the advertisers will squander lots of money (and lots of small players will find ways to make a modest income gaming the mechanism). The Web's advertising model will break down again.
6:13:22 PM 
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CNN. Blackout. Massive power outage from NYC to Detroit.
5:21:13 PM
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Rush Limbaugh: "Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a conservative -- period," talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his millions of listeners this week. But as Limbaugh later explained in an interview, "That does not mean that he is not worthy." LOL.
9:15:36 AM
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 This is another interesting device: A wireless media adapter that you can connect to your TV and stereo.
Using the included remote control and the user-friendly menus on your TV, you can browse through the digital pictures on your computer by folder, filename, or thumbnail. You can view pictures one at a time, or watch an automatically created slideshow of all the pictures in a given folder... You can also use the remote to browse your MP3 or WMA formatted music collection by title, artist, genre, folder, or playlist. Choose the music you want, and let the Wireless-B Media Adapter play it through your stereo system. You can even let music play in the background while you browse your pictures.
8:48:08 AM
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 This is type of form factor I am looking for in a WiFi repeater (this is for an electrical system network).
Does anyone know of one?
Note: Back in 1994, I was working with a team that was looking at the economics of high-density digital cellular systems. One of the biggest factors in the analysis was the size of the footprint. A device like the above would allow a significant expansion of the footprint of each hub connection for short dollars.
8:21:29 AM
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Glenn Fleishman (also in InfoWorld). 802.15.3a (the leading contender is Ultra Wide Band -- UWB) is one of those technologies that you have to wish was here yesterday
What's the joy with UWB? Very high speeds over very short distances. Imagine walking in with your laptop and even as you get near your office, a file transfer starts that, in a minute or so, moves hundreds of megabytes between them. Imagine plopping a hard drive next to your computer and seeing it mount. Imagine wheeling a shared scanner into your office and just starting to work. Imagine having several monitors, none of them connected, all of them providing extremely high-quality displays -- and your computer is in a closet next door.
8:01:12 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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Has any used one of these new 
