Online advertising is now dead
Thursday, November 13, 2008 by Dave Winer.
I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road. 
Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.
The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.
No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.
It's the first thing companies cut when business dries up, and it'll be completely forgotten when the economy comes back. Growth will come from putting your commercial information where people will find it when they're looking and that won't cost anything.
Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information.
The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry ("people who bought this also bought this") -- and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.
When I bought the coffee maker originally I had no idea that Cuisinart even makes one. I was of course aware of the brand, did they advertise to make me aware of it? Not sure, I don't recall ever seeing one, but they probably did run an ad somewhere. That kind of advertising might have a future of some kind. But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much. I wanted hot coffee that stayed fresh, and was willing to pay extra for it. I should have known they make fragile carafes and overcharge for replacements, but they got me. 
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Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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