In less than two years, the Internet—or more specifically, the World Wide Web—has surpassed CD-ROM as the new publishing medium of choice. According to Nicholas Negroponte, head of MIT’s Media Lab, 80 percent of all homes in the United States are equipped with personal computers and there is no such thing as a computer-illiterate 15-year-old.
Teenagers and those over-55 are the highest-growth age brackets for computer use. Between these two generations are the generations Negroponte calls the “digital homeless.” The digital homeless are neither stupid nor poor; they simply arrived on the planet too soon for their own good relative to computing and telecommunications technology.
Unfortunately, the world is run by the digital homeless, which Negroponte says explains the German attempt to censor CompuServe and the Communications Decency Act in the United States.
According to Negroponte, 1996 will be the year of electronic money, with untraceable digital cash floating around the Net. Until now the primary sources of income on the Net have been (in order) subscriptions, advertising, and transactions. In the next three to five years the order will shift to transactions, advertising, and subscriptions with the possible elimination of subscription revenues altogether. Negroponte sees some information providers in the future willing to pay us to browse their sites. Stay tuned….
Advertising vs. Marketing vs. “Presence” on the Net
Guess what. High-priced research indicates people are getting more comfortable with technology. Are you surprised?
Know what else? Companies are continually looking for new ways to link their organizations with their customers.
Seems logical to conclude that as these two trends combine, a shift will occur in the way customers communicate with vendors. Problem is that we’re getting comfortable with the necessary technology a lot faster than Corporate America is. And that’s why advertising on the Internet will be a dismal failure—at least in the near term.
Marketeers see the Internet as just another medium (and at least they’re a step ahead of those who see the Net as just another market). This misperception is a mistake with serious backlash potential for anyone who doesn’t think it through completely. In print and broadcast media, the cost to distribute marketing material is borne by the advertiser. When you buy a magazine or subscribe to cable television, you think you’re paying for content, not advertisements. Most users of mainstream media will readily accept advertising on the premise that it reduces the cost of the delivered content. For the most part we’re pretty stupid and fail to realize that advertising-supported media is not a content delivery mechanism for us, but rather, a viewer delivery mechanism for the advertisers.
On the Internet, though, the cost of information distribution is borne by the user. The user pays to receive (and retrieve) information. We can throw away paper junk mail we receive because it costs us nothing (actually it does cost us much more than any of us realizes as landfills continue to grow, but that’s another story). The same information received electronically, via the Net however, costs the same to receive as any other bit of information. Problem is, there’s no way of knowing ahead of time which bits are worthwhile and which bits are useless.
Someday soon, it’s likely that we’ll be offered an incentive to view certain information on the Web. Either that or we’ll all be paying someone else to filter bits for us.
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