Yahoo and other content aggregators are finding that the more content they have, the less value it has. Ad rates for Yahoo and AOL have plummeted. Meanwhile, services that find interesting content like Google are doing exceeding well.
Moreover, advertisers have a wider range of competitors to reach their target markets. And they are increasingly working with advertising exchanges that buy ad space inexpensively across multiple properties.
Even smaller publishers like Salon and Slate are not consistently profitable.
“It’s a simple rule of any market,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The more information that is created, the more the value is reduced. And despite attempts to woo spending with bigger, bolder and more targeted ads, services that help consumers navigate that content, namely search, remain the big money makers online.”
“Most people make money pointing to content, not creating, curating or collecting content,” suggests Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the digital-media unit of Publicis Groupe SA.
August 6 marked the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee publishing the first website at CERN. Techdirt provides a few guesses regarding where we might stand today had Berners-Lee sought and received a patent for the World Wide Web.
The article suggests that innovation would be dramatically limited and rather than an open World Wide Web, we would be using proprietary, walled gardens such as AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. The idea of open Internet development would be hampered by lawsuits.
Search functionality would most likely be dismal (no Google, for example), and limited to proprietary systems. We may also not have seen the meteoric rise of smartphones without the Web.
And try to imagine this: “Most people’s use of online services would be more about ‘consumption’ than ‘communication.’ There would still be chat rooms and such, but there wouldn’t be massive public communication developments like blogs and Twitter. There might be some social networking elements, but they would be very rudimentary within the walled garden.”
What are your thoughts? If Berners-Lee had not been so generous, would innovation be stalled in patent hell? Or would we have moved forward with other systems in development at the time?