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Monday, November 17, 2008
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.
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