I knocked Nicholas Carr last week for being too pessimistic in his description of the publishing models for online news. But Jay Rosen thinks he may be too optimistic in his already pretty dark outlook on online advertising:
In some ways the picture may be worse than Carr portrays it, or at least more disruptive. In the view of Doc Searls—a student of the web—it’s not only that the advertising market is shifting radically and disrupting the subsidy for news. Advertising itself is under pressure from the Internet:
While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.
Advertisers aren’t in business to advertise; they do it to reach customers making a buying decision. If there were some other way of reaching that person, some other way for buyers and sellers to communicate, advertising would become more and more superfluous. He’s not saying we are there yet. “Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.”
When folks are able to see the return on their investment, in other words, it just might turn out it was never really worth it.
