Why can't a blog sell ads?

Blog | advertising

The internet economy is often called the "attention economy". The general understanding is that the era we are in is a time of great attention, with super girls, Ms. Xu and Acosta the attention of tens of millions of people at a pace we could not have imagined a few years ago. But I read a few days ago that our present age is an era of attention (relative) scarcity.

The origins of attention scarcity are:

The production, manufacture, dissemination and distribution of information are becoming simpler and less costly, and everyone is likely to be the producer and manufacturer of information; everyone is trying to spread and distribute information
All forms of media are everywhere, Everything is media, are scrambling for attention
A severe oversupply of information has caused attention to become a scarce commodity. Advertisers are paying an increasingly high price for attention.

Blogs attract a high concentration of attention. But so far, including MySpace, which has 70 million bloggers, no business case has been successfully sold to advertisers for the attention of bloggers.

What I'm going to repeat today is what the articles are about, why the attention that blogs attract cannot be effectively translated into business value.

The founder and first chairman of ICANN, the International Name Management Agency, is currently free to edit Ms. Ester Dyson, who interviewed the Wall Street Journal on the 10 anniversary of the Wall Street Journal's website, talked about Web 2.0. In her view (not the text, the explanation of Publishing 2.0 's blog Master Scott Karp and my own understanding), unlike ordinary readers, the Web 2.0 user's activity on the Web 2.0 site is not to give their attention but always try to get attention from others. When everyone is doing this, the focus is on swapping and competing between users, and Web 2.0 sites are relegated to the background of unnoticed attention. A Web 2.0 site that focuses only on the user's internal circulation, no matter how popular it is, still does not collect as much attention as it can sell to advertisers.

Many people do not have much access to a blog site before they start blogging. We don't know how many non-blogging readers are reading our blogs. But the basic thing is that many people read other people's blogs to write their own blogs. This is an example of how attention is exchanged between users. With the exception of Sina and Sohu, blogs are now an important and free source of content for Sina's channel.

Ms. Dyson further elaborated that television has created a desire for attention and that the Internet gives them the means to gain attention. When people start to measure their value by their friends on social networking sites (such as Friendster) or the fans on their blogs, advertising is no longer the center of attention.

We are the content of consumers, but now everyone is making their own content, then who will consume content?
Scott Karp asked.

We all want to be read and want to be important, authoritative and influential, but the more people we think about, the more our aspirations violate the laws of nature. Because people don't need too many choices, too many choices make people headache, too many choices are violent (tyranny of Too much).

Barry Schwartz, the author of Paradox of Choice, a professor of American sociology, took his readers to a small supermarket where they found 285 different cookies (cookies), 85 juices, 230 soups, 120 pasta seasonings, 275 cereals, 175 kinds of tea bags. When shoppers face so many choices, they end up refusing to make a choice: they buy home, still the brand they've been buying.

Carl Howe, author of Tyranny's Too, points out that American media has gone through four stages over the past 50 years, with a stage of content and attention (absolute) scarcity, a scarce but highly focused stage, a period of rich content and attention, And the rich but focused (relative) scarcity of what we are now and the future. In the rich and complex content before, we will choose the reliable navigation (branded Guide) to choose our content consumption,

As a result, companies like Google are in an unprecedented position to gain the attention that we are reluctant to give at random.