The Deets - Ed Kohler's #1 Minneapolis Blog. Will online advertisers value smaller, more engaged audiences ov. Twitter.org? and building models for soci. My friend and former business partner, Bo Peabody, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post titled “Twitter.org?” He argues that social media is extremely difficult to support via advertising, unlikely to make profits for venture capital investors, and is sufficiently important that we should try to build non-profit models to support emerging infrastructures like Twitter. Bo’s got some experience to draw from in offering these observations. He was the founding CEO of Tripod, which provided free homepages for over 15 million users in the pre-history of the web (1998) and peaked as the 8th most trafficked site on the web. While Bo, I and other Tripodians did just fine selling our baby to Lycos, the site never came within spitting range of profitability while we ran it.
As Bo points out in his op-ed, advertisers were just never that excited about putting ads on a webpage displaying someone’s condom collection. So what? Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet. Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In it, he argues that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,” he writes.
The views he expresses are his own, and we present them here to foster debate. (Obviously, we hope there is a place for advertising on the Internet since it pays our bills). 1. The expected drop in internet advertising revenues this year was neither unpredictable nor unpredicted, nor was it caused solely by the general recession and the decline in retail sales.
Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. 2. 3. Consumers do not trust advertising. 4. OK, guys.