Internet idiots

Friday, November 14, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Ycombinator and Reddit loved my piece about advertising being dead, most of the people thinking I was wrong (to paraphrase them with more respect than most of them had). I'm sure I was right. You had to click on the links and actually read the piece and have an IQ over 85 to understand what I was saying. I wasn't writing it for them, rather I was writing it for the small number of people who read this site regularly. It has been an evolving story. You don't have to believe me, or agree with me, but you could of course think about it and maybe get an idea or two of your own that isn't guttural.  

However many people understood exactly what I was saying.  

The Internet is a wonderful commercial environment. It has trained me to expect the impossible from real-world retail. When I last visited Fry's I wished I could hide all the items on the shelf that don't match my search criteria. I was looking for a DVI to HDMI adapter. The perfect product was sitting there right on the shelf, but it took me five minutes to find it, and I almost gave up. Had I been on Amazon, or even Fry's website, I would have found it much more quickly.  

A commenter named Hartsock put it perfectly: "I look forward to the day when I can search like this: "pants waist:38in inseam:32in cargo" and find a listing of cargo pants that fit me and places I can go and buy them." 

However this is not advertising! It is commercial information. The former is in our way, the latter is what we seek.  

It's amazing that we're not there yet. But it would be unbelievable to think we're not going there.  

So dear Internet idiots, that's what I'm talking about.  

The death of advertising is on its way. The recesssion is going to slow down advertising (no not completely, of course) for the next few quarters at least. When the economy comes back there will have been enough progress in developing the commercial information side of things that marketers will not need to hitch a ride on other people's content, nor will there be any value in doing so, in order to be able to spread the memes, ideas, and info about their latest products.  

For another example, how many ads have you seen for netbooks? Yet it's the hottest category in computers. No need to advertise, nor would ads have helped.  

We're adept at influencing each other, we don't need to go through Madison Avenue for that anymore.