Death watch

Last Thursday, blogging’s father Dave Winer suggested that online advertising is dead. “Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now,” Dave writes, “when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.”

That’s a scary thought for all those online properties whose business models revolve around online advertising. Think Facebook, MySpace, blog networks like Gawker, and a little company you may have heard of called Google.

I’ve caught no wind of Google scrambling to identify a new business model. That is, no doubt, because online advertising isn’t dead. It is, however, just one of the many targets of such proclamations, many of which crop up every so often when somebody revisits the meme. According to the oh-so-prescient pundits among us…

• PR is dead (killed by social media)
• Blogs are dead (replaced by Twitter and other channels)
• Press releases are dead (replaced by blogs—but wait, aren’t blogs dead?)
• Journalism is dead (replaced by user-generated content)
• Encyclopedias are dead (replaced by Wikipedia)
• Newspapers are dead (replaced by citizen journalism and, um, online newspapers)
• Print is dead (people will page through the paintings of Michelangelo on their laptops instead of high-quality coffee table books)
• Terrestrial radio is dead (whew! I won’t have to listen to any more Raiders debacles in my car)
• Anything not digital is dead (replaced by, well, everything digital)
• Microsoft Office is dead (everyone’s switching to SaaS and OpenOffice)—update - hat tip to @swhitley

I’m sure I’ve missed a few predictions of the demise of anything that isn’t digital/social/populist. (Send them along; I’ll add them to the list.)

Of course, none of these things are dead, or even dying. Some are scaling back as alternatives enter the marketplace. Some are struggling to identify a new business model. But none of these will have completely vanished by 2012, or even by 2018. Or 2100.

I plan to cover each of these as time allows in a series on why the death of (fill in the blank) has been, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. Stand by.

1. “The king is dead.. long live the king”

   “death” is nearly as magnetic as “free” in a headline. It’s what got me to look at this post.

   Good copy, but only a fool would believe that we will give up on something that works

   Posted by Warren Whitlock  on  11/17  at  07:26 AM

2. this blog post is dead. Death to the Blog A-Listers: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004018.html

   Posted by @mattceni  on  11/17  at  07:46 AM

3. Great post, Shel. But didn’t you hear?

   Counter-arguing against people who say things are dead is apparently dead these days.

   

   Posted by Stephen Davies  on  11/17  at  10:29 AM

4. Dam right Shel! I’m so fatigued by people who clamor for headlines by making such grossly exaggerated claims about someone or something’s “death”... the same is true for “re-invention” and “revolution” (or claims to define Web 3.0 or Intranet 4.0 or anything with a version number).

   Advertising is not dead… in fact, it’s going to explode once we’re through this recession. Long live the revolution.

   Posted by Toby Ward  on  11/17  at  12:14 PM

5. True on most of the above and I thought this was a pretty OTT headline too. “Best days behind it” is often translated as “dead” these days. If you apply that to what Winer was saying he has a valid point.

   But people are definitely too quick to call things a lot of the time. The whole “blogging is dead” debate is a classic example of getting too caught up in hype and not looking at the reality and adpatation of use.

   In some cases death will happen. You’ve split “print” and “newspapers”, but I can see actual print newspapers dying eventually (especially by 2100AD!). We don’t use stone tablets any more, and nor will we use ink-printed newspapers once e-ink takes off on a larger scale. We’ll still have the written words, but the format or “device” they’re on will change. It will just take time.

   That’s the big problem here. The overstatement of speed. Sure we can communicate rapidly, and it allows us to act faster, but the outcomes from changes and events still take time to emerge. - usually longer than people take to read a news article on it.

   Posted by Alex Manchester  on  11/17  at  04:56 PM

6. I despise the “death of ...x” meme. Things evolve, they don’t die. Do people use computers? Yes. Is that where their eyeballs are? Yes. Ergo, there will be advertising, in some form or another, there.

   Same with the other examples: blogging, newspapers, print (they will pry regular books from my cold, dead hands…).

   Funny though, I saw the headline on this post and thought that Google Flu trends had morphed into something far more grim. The power of Google…

   Jen

   Posted by Jen Zingsheim  on  11/18  at  05:44 AM

7. Very timely topic Shel as I might find myself right in the middle of this challenge. I am being considered for a position with an agency facing just this sort of transition. The agency’s historical bread and butter has been developing yellow pages advertising.

   They realize that the future lies in developing interactive capabilities for their clients and estimate that they have to have forward thinking strategies to offer in the next 18 - 24 months. They have started down this path but the EVP realizes they are behind the curve.

   The challenge will be how to protect/minimize fall-off of their print business revenue while they transition further into the digital arena. Any thoughts or insights from the collective minds that are here?

   Thanks,

   Craig

   Posted by Craig Jolley  on  11/18  at  08:15 AM

8. @Craig I don’t have an answer, but last night some friends and I were discussing the whole “print to online” transition and we surmised that you need (in no particular order): a) Lot’s of capital to weather the transition b) the balls and vision to dramatically refocus on online activities c) good input from people who spend a lot of time online and very little using paper/one-way services d) the management team capable of executing the transition.

   Posted by Alex Manchester  on  11/18  at  01:14 PM

9. @Alex Thanks for the thoughts. Coincidentally, I met a recruiting manager for Thomasnet.com last night and we were speaking about this very question. For those who may not remember, Thomas used to publish a massive set of printed directories of just about every industrial product made in the USA. In my early years when I worked for an advertising & marketing communications agency the green, hard bound Thomas directories occupied a complete shelf in our agency reference library and we spent a lot of money each year on updated versions.

   Thomas has now gone, as I understand it, completely online. In our conversation the recruiting manager admitted that he wished the company still had some sort of printed product to compliment their online offering. Said the company still lost out on significant sales opportunities in some industry sectors due to lack of online access or broadband capability, incompatible workflow processes for the online service, resistance to technology, etc.

   Posted by Craig Jolley  on  11/19  at  04:31 AM

10. @Craig I wonder if those sales lost would cover the cost of producing the print product from start to finish, and then if there was any profit, whether that could be matched by investing in new products elsewhere instead of reviving the print product. Would be an interesting analysis.

    Posted by Alex Manchester  on  11/19  at  02:15 PM

11. Alex, I didn’t get the sense that he was advocating for the entire replication of the print directory line, but thought they should have something in printed format. What that might be is unknown, and he didn’t offer any additional information regarding the amount of revenue the lost sales represented which would indeed offer some interesting analysis opportunities.

    Craig

    Posted by Craig Jolley  on  11/19  at  05:34 PM

12. Print is almost dead in real estate (except for seller ego gratification).  The future is online however the challenge is the integration of technology into the industry.  Average Realtor is 53, the Broker/Owner 62 - Difficult to evaluate ROI.  Realtors are learning the options but it will take time to adapt.  Less than 5% in social networking.  It is alive and well at Virtual Homes.

    Posted by Fred Doleac  on  11/26  at  05:58 PM

13. Don’t forget mainframes, television, Java, e-mail, and Windows Vista (which lives on as Windows 7).

    Posted by RBL  on  11/30  at  02:46 PM