Kuro5hin is not only running text advertising, but allowing its readers to comment on the ads. Hypergene MediaBlog has an interview with Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin on the most innovative Web advertising I’ve seen since the invention of the banner ad.
While other sites are trying to make the Web advertising more like TV, or radio, or billboards, or telemarketing, Rusty is making it more like the Web.
AOL is forcing its customers to listen to AOL/TW recording artists while they’re on hold. This tactic reminds me of one that Wells Fargo uses: you must listen to an ad for one of their overpriced services as a condition for activating your credit card.
Big-name companies are continuing to erase the line that divides them from spammers.
The NY Times has a good article about how high prices are stifling “broadband” adoption, following AOL’s announcement of its approach to broadband.
Apparently it’s doubtful that any providers can make money at $40 to $55/month in charges to the user:
[AOL] has developed a new approach to these deals that includes the brand of the network provider along with AOL’s. That makes things clearer for consumers and less of a threat to the cable and phone companies.
In the first of those deals, with Comcast, AOL will price the bundled service at $55 a month, $6 less than the combined price of Comcast’s broadband service and AOL’s bring-your-own-access plan.
Still, that is about $10 a month more than other providers are charging. That premium is how AOL actually makes a profit on its broadband service when Earthlink loses money charging $42 to $50 a month.
Clearly the access monopolies (cable and ILEC’s) are raking it it at these rates. Their profits are near 100% because their costs are near zero. AOL and Earthlink can’t sell broadband access because they don’t own any.
They finally cracked the digital Doomsday Book. In less than fifteen years, the discs had become unreadable on any existing equipment. New media, especially proprietary formats, are far from a permanent record of anything.
“By contrast, the original Domesday Book, an inventory of England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks, is in fine condition in the Public Record Office in Kew, London.” (Thanks to WebWord)
Wired News brings us a telling quote from John Sculley, former president of Apple Computer:
It’s no coincidence that during the late 1980s and early 1990s it was a marketing executive from Pepsi, John Sculley, who turned Apple into the biggest single computer company in the world, with $11 billion in annual sales. Sculley marketed Apple like crazy, boosting the advertising budget from $15 million to $100 million.
“People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company,” Sculley told the Guardian newspaper in 1997. “It was the marketing company of the decade.”
Does he really believe that?
Sculley squandered Apple’s lead over Microsoft (and billions of dollars) through a combination of a high-margin strategy when the PC market was becoming commoditized and an utter failure to deliver new technology.
Great marketing is worthless if you don’t deliver the goods.
Henry Luce’s baby (Time Inc.) now belongs to Steve Case’s baby. Time is not exactly the same company the creator of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated bequeathed to his heirs. But until this moment, I don’t think I appreciated how far it had fallen from relevance.
Time Inc’s journalism is now something AOL can give away to sell subscriptions — the journalistic equivalent of all those CD’s you get in the mail.
If this is such a hot deal, why hasn’t Conde Nast, Hearst, or Primedia jumped at it?
I mentioned Henry Luce earlier mainly so I could relate this anecdote:
Dorothy Parker and Clare Booth Luce — arguably two of America’s great twentieth century literary women — come to a door at the same time. Luce steps aside, saying, “Age before beauty”. Dorothy Parker walks through the door, saying, “…and pearls before swine.”
Connectivity monopolies should have no more control over our computers than the electricity monopolies power them.
Mitch Ratcliffe is toying with the motto “asynchrony is slavery” and says maybe we should forge our own connections to the Internet.
Connectivity is a natural monopoly.
If you want to plug into the Internet from your home you’ve got two choices (if you’re lucky): a copper wire through the central office of your local telephone monopoly, or a coaxial cable through the headend of your local cable monopoly. Each of these is part of a national telephone or cable oligopoly. Satellite (which requires a dial-up connection for outbound traffic) is not an option for a real two-way connection to the Net.
There are good reasons why connectivity is a monopoly. Most of the cost of setting up a utility is fixed and once the pipe is laid, it’s pretty much impossible for a competitor to make the investment a second time.
Cable companies and telco’s will continue to act as only monopolies know how to act. As long as you’re buying access to the Internet from a local mono/duopoly, you’re at the mercy of what passes for strategy at their home office: creating false bandwidth scarcity, so they can charge you more for what you’re using.
This “strategy” leads to arbitrary limits on the number of bytes you can move in a month, what networks and servers you can connect to, what software and hardware you can use, and the amount of bandwidth you can use at any moment. Each of these arbitrary limits comes with additional charges, based on their estimate of its value to you and not on their costs.
Ultimately, we wind up in a world where arbitrary bandwidth limits are enforced by Federal cops, who will break down your door and nationalize your property if you circumvent your local Internet monopoly.
We know how to regulate natural monopolies.
Fortunately, we already know how to regulate natural monopolies. We’ve been doing it for a hundred years.
Connectivity is a commodity. Unless we treat it as a commodity and don’t permit the local monopolist to “add value” to the plug in the wall and the wire in the ground and the router in the central office, we’re at their mercy and at the mercy of the government agencies who control them (and vice versa).
Connectivity monopolies should be required to do business with anyone in their service area and should not be permitted to discriminate on the basis of how you use the wire or the content of your communications. They should be guaranteed a reasonable return on their capital. If their stockholders don’t like this predictable revenue stream, they are free to invest their money in a different industry. It’s a free market, after all.
We must separate connectivity from content.
If we don’t keep the connectivity monopolies out of our business, they will exercise control over us not simply to maximize our profits. Their self-interest, monitoring of our behavior, and cozy relationship with the government whence flows their profits makes them the ideal instruments of censors, intellectual property cartels, Scientologists, software monopolists, and anyone else who thinks they have a better idea than you do about what you should be doing in the privacy of your home…and in the publicity of the Internet.
The monopolies who control our access to the Internet must be made transparent to us, and our communication with the Net must be transparent to them.