The addiction to traffic and impressions-based advertising has been an Achilles’ heel of the media establishment. It is hard for them to look at the world through the lens of engagement. The rise of “chat-based” informational interfaces is yet another victory for engagement-trumps-all doctrine.
For all my liberal sentiment around how I believe the Government has a serious role in ensuring a strong net for the polity, I also have a cut throat capitalist streak. As a result, at the risk of sounding corporatist, I believe that no corporation must exist. Sure things will be different and there can be benevolent corporations. However, capitalism deems that companies live and die by their ability to keep themselves alive.
“It felt like we were back in the Napster days for the music industry and that maybe we could supply a Spotify-like solution – a recurring revenue model for the publishing industry,” Joslin said.
Since then – just 18 months – Tollbit, has become one of the most talked about new ventures in the tech/media startup community. More than 2000 publications now use Tollbit’s system including Time, Newsweek, AdWeek and the Associated Press. That list also includes publications owned by Penske Media, like Rolling Stone; publications owned by Mansueto Ventures, like Inc and Fast Company; publications owned by Lee Enterprises, which includes almost 80 newspapers; and publications owned by Hearst, which include 27 magazines like Elle and 30 newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle.
Online tolls is such a new business that it’s too soon to predict how meaningful first mover advantage will be. But we’re about to find out how much it matters. Cloudflare, the $60 billion content delivery network and cybersecurity giant, is gearing up to launch its own online tollboth on July 1, according to someone who has seen a draft of the press release.
The prospect of a new revenue stream like this is tantalizing for publishers. For those with long tenures in the business it also feels richly deserved. One of the biggest mistakes the industry made 25 years ago was not taking Google’s rise seriously enough and therefore not demanding more compensation for letting Google crawl their websites when Google was small enough to be pushed around. “Pointing this out is often the last thing we tell publishers when we meet with them,”Panigrahi said. “ Imagine knowing what you know now about Google back then. This is your opportunity to turn the clock back 25 years.’”
This paragraph fills me with dread. Google's growth, like the web's (and bitcoin's) was organic. Engineering incentive alignment has rarely, if ever, worked to meet its design goals. However, as I said, I am ruthlessly capitalistic in these situations and the sad truth is that, in life, there are going to be cases where someone is at an (unfair) disadvantage. In that moment, you can only think about two things - survival and then realistic options. Ideally, they work together to let you play another round of the game.
gurupanguji