How to Increase Google PageRank
Google PageRank (PR) is a measure from 0 -10 of how important Google thinks a webpage is. In Google's eyes a web page with a PageRank of 10/10 is very important and a web page with a PageRank of 0/10 is not very important. If you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser then it will automatically tell you the PageRank of any webpage you are looking at, if you do not have one then you can check PageRank by visiting the following website.
PageRank Checking Tool (http://www.prchecker.info/)
Generally websites with higher PageRank will get better rankings in Google's search results. Google takes into consideration many things when it is calculating PageRank, the most important factor is the amount of quality incoming links a webpage has. Generally the more quality links a webpage has, the higher the PageRank will be, therefore you can increase PageRank by gaining more quality links.
PageRank updates about once every three months. People have come up with ways of trying to predict what your PageRank is likely to be at the next update and although no one can tell for sure the guys at Iwebtool have come up with a pretty good prediction tool.
PageRank Predictor (http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction)
This tool does not always get it right, and it is mainly for entertainment purposes only. However if you work hard at link building you will see your predicted PageRank increase and when the next update comes you should see your PageRank increase.
For a more in-depth analysis of PageRank, please read Phil Cravens article PageRank Explained. (http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html)
Artice Source: http://www.seoco.co.uk/search-engine-articles/pagerank.html
Friday, January 29, 2010
Traffic Generation – How to Generate Huge Traffic Almost Free
Traffic Generation – How to Generate Huge Traffic Almost Free
Traffic generation – if you have been online for long, traffic generation has been something that you have had to learn to master, or you do not have much business. That is just the way it is – you have to generate traffic if you are going to make money online.
Now, one of the much-discussed areas of traffic generation is free traffic generation. And I think that most people that get into free traffic generation will look for free advertising, free ezine ads, free web traffic, and all other kinds of traffic that is called ‘free’. But that traffic really is poor traffic for lots of reasons, one being that only generally only freebie seekers use this traffic – nobody really makes money with free traffic – it is free, afterall, so what incentive is there to have good free traffic?
But I have discovered a few sources of traffic that is not usually limped in with the free traffic, and although it requires some amount of work (20 hours per week is recommended), will create incredible levels of traffic to you.
The root of all this free traffic generation is in maximizing your natural search engine rankings so that your web site comes up in the top ten rankings for your main keyword, and then the search engines send you free traffic.
So how do you do this?
1) Make sure your web site is at least minimally optimized for the search engines…for example, use your main keyword in the title, in your keywords, and at least a few times throughout the web site.
2) Write 10 articles about your web sites’ main topics. Send each of these articles to at least 100 different article directories online. Include an anchor text link in each of the articles with your web site’s main keyword as the text in the anchor link.
3) Submit your web site to at least 100 web directories. The backlinks you get from doing this are priceless, and are easy to get, they just take time, and when you are getting started online, you have more time and less money…so use this little-used technique.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'
Download it free here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezrss.html
Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/listbuilding.htm
Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Mize
Traffic generation – if you have been online for long, traffic generation has been something that you have had to learn to master, or you do not have much business. That is just the way it is – you have to generate traffic if you are going to make money online.
Now, one of the much-discussed areas of traffic generation is free traffic generation. And I think that most people that get into free traffic generation will look for free advertising, free ezine ads, free web traffic, and all other kinds of traffic that is called ‘free’. But that traffic really is poor traffic for lots of reasons, one being that only generally only freebie seekers use this traffic – nobody really makes money with free traffic – it is free, afterall, so what incentive is there to have good free traffic?
But I have discovered a few sources of traffic that is not usually limped in with the free traffic, and although it requires some amount of work (20 hours per week is recommended), will create incredible levels of traffic to you.
The root of all this free traffic generation is in maximizing your natural search engine rankings so that your web site comes up in the top ten rankings for your main keyword, and then the search engines send you free traffic.
So how do you do this?
1) Make sure your web site is at least minimally optimized for the search engines…for example, use your main keyword in the title, in your keywords, and at least a few times throughout the web site.
2) Write 10 articles about your web sites’ main topics. Send each of these articles to at least 100 different article directories online. Include an anchor text link in each of the articles with your web site’s main keyword as the text in the anchor link.
3) Submit your web site to at least 100 web directories. The backlinks you get from doing this are priceless, and are easy to get, they just take time, and when you are getting started online, you have more time and less money…so use this little-used technique.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, 'Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide'
Download it free here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/ezrss.html
Do you want to learn how to build a big online subscriber list fast? Click here: http://www.secrets-of-internet-success.com/listbuilding.htm
Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 9034 articles in print and 14 published ebooks.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Mize
How To Get Massive MLM Website Traffic For Free
How To Get Massive MLM Website Traffic For Free
Are you struggling to get traffic to your MLM related website without breaking your bank account? If you want to get cheap traffic quickly while building your prospect list, one of the best methods is to join MLM related groups within social networking websites. While there are several websites that MLM professionals frequent, you will have the most success if your primary focus is on the business oriented websites like Direct Matches and Ryze.
Networking with your fellow MLM professionals can increase links back to your website, increase your chances of being seen as an expert, increase your mailing list, sell more of your product, get new team members to sign up, make you new friends - in fact there's not a lot to be said against joining a few MLM related groups and networking online. However, there are some things to think about before you get started:
DO:
1. Research each networking group before you join. Make sure it's relevant to your business and see if the participants are in your target market. Look at how much traffic the group gets. How busy is it? - there's no point in joining a dead group with very few posts.
2. Check the group rules before you post. Some groups will allow you to post advertisements for your business while others will object. Check if you are allowed to add a signature at the end of your posts - adding a small biography with a web link to your business is a great way to increase incoming links to your site and to get more traffic.
3. Be polite and treat everyone the way you would like to be treated. Even though you don't meet people face to face you will build up some great relationships if you take the time to give good answers to questions, to be helpful and to respect other people's opinions. And every post you answer adds to your reputation. Use your posts to give genuine, useful advice, not just to plug your business and you'll soon be looked on as an expert.
4. Don't be afraid to ask for advice - no-one knows everything and sometimes you will need help.
5. To make the most of your time on the groups, allow yourself only a certain amount of time each day. Read only the posts that are relevant and that interest you and post answers quickly before moving on. It's very easy to spend the whole day on groups and not get anything else done.
DON'T:
1. Never, ever use a post to blatantly advertise your business, particularly if the group rules don't allow it. Nothing will damage your reputation faster than spamming a group.
2. Don't go through the list of group members, collect email addresses and send them unsolicited mail. At best you'll be banned from the group and at worst the owners might report you to your ISP.
3. Don't ever get involved in a flame war (this is when a heated conversation on a group boils over and degenerates into nothing but an exchange of personal insults). It might be really satisfying to say what you think about someone, especially if they've been getting on your nerves, but just imagine what other people will think of you if you do.
In conclusion, treat people online like you treat people in real life. Think of it as a networking event that's taking place on your computer and don't forget that other posts on the groups are made by real people with real feelings.
You already know how to make friends and new contacts face to face. Apply what you already know to online networking and you could be enjoying great success with a global audience.
Article Source: http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/20296/marketing/how_to_get_m...
Are you struggling to get traffic to your MLM related website without breaking your bank account? If you want to get cheap traffic quickly while building your prospect list, one of the best methods is to join MLM related groups within social networking websites. While there are several websites that MLM professionals frequent, you will have the most success if your primary focus is on the business oriented websites like Direct Matches and Ryze.
Networking with your fellow MLM professionals can increase links back to your website, increase your chances of being seen as an expert, increase your mailing list, sell more of your product, get new team members to sign up, make you new friends - in fact there's not a lot to be said against joining a few MLM related groups and networking online. However, there are some things to think about before you get started:
DO:
1. Research each networking group before you join. Make sure it's relevant to your business and see if the participants are in your target market. Look at how much traffic the group gets. How busy is it? - there's no point in joining a dead group with very few posts.
2. Check the group rules before you post. Some groups will allow you to post advertisements for your business while others will object. Check if you are allowed to add a signature at the end of your posts - adding a small biography with a web link to your business is a great way to increase incoming links to your site and to get more traffic.
3. Be polite and treat everyone the way you would like to be treated. Even though you don't meet people face to face you will build up some great relationships if you take the time to give good answers to questions, to be helpful and to respect other people's opinions. And every post you answer adds to your reputation. Use your posts to give genuine, useful advice, not just to plug your business and you'll soon be looked on as an expert.
4. Don't be afraid to ask for advice - no-one knows everything and sometimes you will need help.
5. To make the most of your time on the groups, allow yourself only a certain amount of time each day. Read only the posts that are relevant and that interest you and post answers quickly before moving on. It's very easy to spend the whole day on groups and not get anything else done.
DON'T:
1. Never, ever use a post to blatantly advertise your business, particularly if the group rules don't allow it. Nothing will damage your reputation faster than spamming a group.
2. Don't go through the list of group members, collect email addresses and send them unsolicited mail. At best you'll be banned from the group and at worst the owners might report you to your ISP.
3. Don't ever get involved in a flame war (this is when a heated conversation on a group boils over and degenerates into nothing but an exchange of personal insults). It might be really satisfying to say what you think about someone, especially if they've been getting on your nerves, but just imagine what other people will think of you if you do.
In conclusion, treat people online like you treat people in real life. Think of it as a networking event that's taking place on your computer and don't forget that other posts on the groups are made by real people with real feelings.
You already know how to make friends and new contacts face to face. Apply what you already know to online networking and you could be enjoying great success with a global audience.
Article Source: http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/20296/marketing/how_to_get_m...
Monday, January 25, 2010
Common Mistakes of Internet Marketers
Common Mistakes of Internet Marketers
If you wish to be a successful Internet marketer you will want to avoid these 8 mistakes:
1. Failure to prepare properly. Many Internet marketers are simply lazy and will not make the effort to prepare properly. Refrain from being overly anxious as if you’ll miss the boat if you do not market your website immediately. Use however many days it takes to setup all the appropriate advertising accounts and advertisements properly. This will make your administration more efficient and enable you to fly through your schedule tasks effortlessly each day. The net result is that your marketing efforts will be far more productive than if you were to take a haphazard approach.
2. Failure to implement an advertising strategy. You must have a plan with well defined goals if you wish to have positive marketing results. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Do not try to recreate the wheel. Find out what successful people are doing and do the same. Regarding goals, write them down. When you achieve a goal mark it as “completed” and replace it with another. By doing this very simple step you can monitor your effectiveness and progress.
3. Failure to be professional. Some of the ads on the Internet are of embarrassingly poor quality. Be professional in your business approach and in the design of your ads. If you lack the ability to produce professional ads then find a resource that can. The quality of your website and advertisements is a reflection on you. Also, when dealing with customers always be courteous and professional even when they are not. If you are professional you will shine above the rest and earn customer confidence.
4. Failure to implement and adhere to a disciplined schedule. If you don’t have a realistic schedule in place then you will not be disciplined in marketing your ads properly. Consistency not volume is the key to success in marketing on the Internet. A schedule allows you to be consistent and also forces you to be disciplined. The Internet is not a “get rich quick” environment. It takes hours of dedicated and consistent work. You must be committed to putting in the time if you wish to have good marketing results.
5. Failure to utilize the right tools. There are some very innovative tools on the Internet to make the operation of your business more efficient. Many of them are very affordable and they will save you from having great frustration. Some marketers take the approach of being a “penny wise and a pound foolish.” In saving their pennies they are losing out on making the bigger dollars. Don’t ignore the many tools which are available.
6. Failure to build a downline. Your downline is the cornerstone of your business. A downline is your customer list or they can be referrals that join certain advetising programs through you serving as an affiliate. Verious advertising sites offer you some type of compensation for bringing them referrals. Don't ignore the value of these referrals. Some Internet marketers are so anxious to advertise their product they fail to have an understanding of the bigger picture. A big downline can save you money in your advertising and enbable you to advertise more effectively. When soliciting always get the email address of your customer for future solicitations and sales.
7. Failure to track ads. Much time is wasted on unproductive sites and ads. If you’re not tracking them you will continually work in ignorance. You must have a measure of what is working and what is not. Is the program that you are participating in yielding the desired results? Are your ads well written and effective in drawing customers? You will never have the answers to these important questions unless you track your ads. You can waste a great deal of time on poor advertising programs and bad ads if you never track the results.
8. Failure to understand the advertising medium. You must understand how each type of advertising program works if you’re going to be an effective marketer. Whether you use pay-per-click advertising or membership driven sites like safelists, traffic exchanges and text ad exchanges all have their own personality. Not only do you need to understand the mechanics of each but also the general personality of their members
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/8-common-mistakes-of-internet-marketers-876279.html
If you wish to be a successful Internet marketer you will want to avoid these 8 mistakes:
1. Failure to prepare properly. Many Internet marketers are simply lazy and will not make the effort to prepare properly. Refrain from being overly anxious as if you’ll miss the boat if you do not market your website immediately. Use however many days it takes to setup all the appropriate advertising accounts and advertisements properly. This will make your administration more efficient and enable you to fly through your schedule tasks effortlessly each day. The net result is that your marketing efforts will be far more productive than if you were to take a haphazard approach.
2. Failure to implement an advertising strategy. You must have a plan with well defined goals if you wish to have positive marketing results. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Do not try to recreate the wheel. Find out what successful people are doing and do the same. Regarding goals, write them down. When you achieve a goal mark it as “completed” and replace it with another. By doing this very simple step you can monitor your effectiveness and progress.
3. Failure to be professional. Some of the ads on the Internet are of embarrassingly poor quality. Be professional in your business approach and in the design of your ads. If you lack the ability to produce professional ads then find a resource that can. The quality of your website and advertisements is a reflection on you. Also, when dealing with customers always be courteous and professional even when they are not. If you are professional you will shine above the rest and earn customer confidence.
4. Failure to implement and adhere to a disciplined schedule. If you don’t have a realistic schedule in place then you will not be disciplined in marketing your ads properly. Consistency not volume is the key to success in marketing on the Internet. A schedule allows you to be consistent and also forces you to be disciplined. The Internet is not a “get rich quick” environment. It takes hours of dedicated and consistent work. You must be committed to putting in the time if you wish to have good marketing results.
5. Failure to utilize the right tools. There are some very innovative tools on the Internet to make the operation of your business more efficient. Many of them are very affordable and they will save you from having great frustration. Some marketers take the approach of being a “penny wise and a pound foolish.” In saving their pennies they are losing out on making the bigger dollars. Don’t ignore the many tools which are available.
6. Failure to build a downline. Your downline is the cornerstone of your business. A downline is your customer list or they can be referrals that join certain advetising programs through you serving as an affiliate. Verious advertising sites offer you some type of compensation for bringing them referrals. Don't ignore the value of these referrals. Some Internet marketers are so anxious to advertise their product they fail to have an understanding of the bigger picture. A big downline can save you money in your advertising and enbable you to advertise more effectively. When soliciting always get the email address of your customer for future solicitations and sales.
7. Failure to track ads. Much time is wasted on unproductive sites and ads. If you’re not tracking them you will continually work in ignorance. You must have a measure of what is working and what is not. Is the program that you are participating in yielding the desired results? Are your ads well written and effective in drawing customers? You will never have the answers to these important questions unless you track your ads. You can waste a great deal of time on poor advertising programs and bad ads if you never track the results.
8. Failure to understand the advertising medium. You must understand how each type of advertising program works if you’re going to be an effective marketer. Whether you use pay-per-click advertising or membership driven sites like safelists, traffic exchanges and text ad exchanges all have their own personality. Not only do you need to understand the mechanics of each but also the general personality of their members
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/8-common-mistakes-of-internet-marketers-876279.html
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Make Money Online Through Writing
Make Money Online Through Writing
Money & Investments Ear Money make money make money online Make Money Writing
Most of the earn money online techniques offer you great returns. These techniques are accepted, as they need you to put the minimum efforts for getting great return. People with great writing talents can earn money through these techniques greatly as there are a good number of opportunities related to writing. There are certain tips that will help you enormously in your efforts to find the best make money online technique.
Writing content for the websites can be a good opportunity related to writing offered on internet. Many of the portals may be paying the writers based on the hits received by their articles. This can be considered as the most important advantage of article writing as this will be an income source till the article is removed from the website. However, the rights of the work remain with the website as you are just doing the work. The topics opted for writing these articles should be appealing so that readers find time to read them. The website will start paying you when a a particular amount of money is collected on the hits received by that article. The money may start coming as long as the article is read by the visitors.
Selling the articles is also a technique that can be used. If you are not confident with the fact that you may be getting paid until your article is removed from the website, you may select the pay per article schemes. The articles may be sold at a specific price per article too. The main disadvantage of this is that you have to give away all the rights on the article. Finding the potential customers is the major necessity of the business opportunities. Choosing the clients is the most significant challenge faced by the individuals writing these articles.
Writing eBooks can also be a great way to earn money online. If you are making a deal with a reputed publisher, you can get great rewards by doing nothing. You just have to furnish the content for publishing the e-Books to the publishers. The only thing, you should do is to write the book and wait for your royalties to come. Many portals offer you excellent options for publishing the e-Books without spending much.
Writing the articles for the sites will be the best technique to earn money online. You should permit the portals to publish your articles and avail the rate as per the hits or the articles. This method needs you to put in the least efforts and get the maximum money.
You may also make use of your writing abilities for affiliate marketing. The basic idea of affiliate marketing is also writing articles. If you are writing articles and contents to market your product, you may get several sites to publish them and thus endorse the product. The returns you make from affiliate marketing is the commission per sales.
However, the major requirement of earning money online through writing is patience. You should be patient enough to search for the best clients for publishing the articles. Quality is another factor that you must keep in mind, as articles without quality will not impress the visitors.
Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/money-investments/make-money-online-through-writing
Money & Investments Ear Money make money make money online Make Money Writing
Most of the earn money online techniques offer you great returns. These techniques are accepted, as they need you to put the minimum efforts for getting great return. People with great writing talents can earn money through these techniques greatly as there are a good number of opportunities related to writing. There are certain tips that will help you enormously in your efforts to find the best make money online technique.
Writing content for the websites can be a good opportunity related to writing offered on internet. Many of the portals may be paying the writers based on the hits received by their articles. This can be considered as the most important advantage of article writing as this will be an income source till the article is removed from the website. However, the rights of the work remain with the website as you are just doing the work. The topics opted for writing these articles should be appealing so that readers find time to read them. The website will start paying you when a a particular amount of money is collected on the hits received by that article. The money may start coming as long as the article is read by the visitors.
Selling the articles is also a technique that can be used. If you are not confident with the fact that you may be getting paid until your article is removed from the website, you may select the pay per article schemes. The articles may be sold at a specific price per article too. The main disadvantage of this is that you have to give away all the rights on the article. Finding the potential customers is the major necessity of the business opportunities. Choosing the clients is the most significant challenge faced by the individuals writing these articles.
Writing eBooks can also be a great way to earn money online. If you are making a deal with a reputed publisher, you can get great rewards by doing nothing. You just have to furnish the content for publishing the e-Books to the publishers. The only thing, you should do is to write the book and wait for your royalties to come. Many portals offer you excellent options for publishing the e-Books without spending much.
Writing the articles for the sites will be the best technique to earn money online. You should permit the portals to publish your articles and avail the rate as per the hits or the articles. This method needs you to put in the least efforts and get the maximum money.
You may also make use of your writing abilities for affiliate marketing. The basic idea of affiliate marketing is also writing articles. If you are writing articles and contents to market your product, you may get several sites to publish them and thus endorse the product. The returns you make from affiliate marketing is the commission per sales.
However, the major requirement of earning money online through writing is patience. You should be patient enough to search for the best clients for publishing the articles. Quality is another factor that you must keep in mind, as articles without quality will not impress the visitors.
Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/money-investments/make-money-online-through-writing
Write For Money - Earn online
Write For Money - Earn online
Computers & Internet AdSense adsense keywords adsense make money adsense marketing adsense revenue adsense-ready amazon blogging sites free blogging google adsense how to make money online make easy money online make money blogging make money online make money online fast make money online free make money with adsense online bookmarks revenue share revenue sharing social bookmarking write for money writing for money
We all know that how to earn online money by displaying Ads on website or blog as a Google Adsense publisher. But the basic question is how to increase Adsense Revenue?
And mostly this is the most unanswerable question for the beginners who wants to earn money very quickly. the experienced people in this field mostly gives the useful tips on quality content, increase traffic, proper Ads placement, SEO and all that. Surely these tips are very necessary and good, but the matter of the fact is they become useful after a very long time. So, to shorten this period; we can use Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites.
Thanks:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/computers-internet/write-money-earn-online
Computers & Internet AdSense adsense keywords adsense make money adsense marketing adsense revenue adsense-ready amazon blogging sites free blogging google adsense how to make money online make easy money online make money blogging make money online make money online fast make money online free make money with adsense online bookmarks revenue share revenue sharing social bookmarking write for money writing for money
We all know that how to earn online money by displaying Ads on website or blog as a Google Adsense publisher. But the basic question is how to increase Adsense Revenue?
And mostly this is the most unanswerable question for the beginners who wants to earn money very quickly. the experienced people in this field mostly gives the useful tips on quality content, increase traffic, proper Ads placement, SEO and all that. Surely these tips are very necessary and good, but the matter of the fact is they become useful after a very long time. So, to shorten this period; we can use Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites.
Thanks:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/computers-internet/write-money-earn-online
How to Get Paid To Publish & Promote Articles Online
Writing Tools & Tips AdSense adsense articles article articles for pay articles online author ehow essay google adsense articles make money money mytripledub online online business online income online job paid paid articles paid to publish paid to write paid writing publication publish published publishing publishing for pay revenue sharing work at home write writer writing writing for pay xomba
Want to make a great income online publishing your articles? Want to promote your Business, Website or Blog and get Paid to do it? Here are the simple and FREE steps to do it and multiply your income with very little additional work. I will even give you help with writing the articles!
First, realize no one site is going to pay you enough to make a really substantial income from writing articles. You must get on MULTIPLE SITES – and ONLY the most profitable! Don’t waste your time with a bad site. Mine are tested personally! Multiple streams of income is far less effort for far more pay! It really is the way to go!
The websites below ALL PAY for your articles as they generate revenue:
SIGN UP TODAY! (It's FREE!!!!!)
Triond: www.triond.com - Original Content only - So publish here first!!!
Xomba: http://www.xomba.com/referral/777d57cl (Pays for referrals too!)
MyTripleDub: http://www.mytripledub.com/referral/777777ed (Pays for Referrals too!)
eHow: www.ehow.com (Pays great – Good traffic)
CORE OF THE SYSTEM:
After you have signed up for these 4 sites you will have everything you need to start earning money right away!
Here are the steps to take - Follow them closely!!!
1) Submit ALL your articles to "Triond" first (as they only accept "Original Content" - which means "Never before published"). Wait until you hear back from Triond by email that you have been Published (usually with 24 hours) ... then submit your content to the other 3 sites ... this will get you earning 4 times the income of any single site!!!
2) Drive Traffic to your Articles & Get Paid for that too!!! These sites listed below will PAY you for advertising your articles - A true "Win-Win"!!!! They even have a "Short-cut" button you can put on your browser to speed things up! They even automatically fill out 50-75% of the submission form for you!
SheToldMe: http://shetoldme.com/referral/73686752
Info Pirate: http://infopirate.org/referral/696e743d
If you have done these steps you should see a substantial income from your articles, especially if you are writing a few per week. The amount you earn is up to you!!!
TIP: Do you want to be able to write articles in just a few minutes, even on topics you know little or nothing about? Try this product: "Instant Article Wizard" go to: http://paulcline7.instantaw.hop.clickbank.net/ I use this tool ALL the time! It only costs a few dollars but you will be able to write articles forever AND it will help you write on HIGH-PAYING keywords, even if you know little about them. Check it out! GREAT for research too!
By: Paul Cline (If you want more FREE resources go to: WWW.PAIDARTICLEPUBLISHINGONLINE.INFO )
More on this...
http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/writing-tools-tips/how-get-paid-publish-promote-articles-online
Want to make a great income online publishing your articles? Want to promote your Business, Website or Blog and get Paid to do it? Here are the simple and FREE steps to do it and multiply your income with very little additional work. I will even give you help with writing the articles!
First, realize no one site is going to pay you enough to make a really substantial income from writing articles. You must get on MULTIPLE SITES – and ONLY the most profitable! Don’t waste your time with a bad site. Mine are tested personally! Multiple streams of income is far less effort for far more pay! It really is the way to go!
The websites below ALL PAY for your articles as they generate revenue:
SIGN UP TODAY! (It's FREE!!!!!)
Triond: www.triond.com - Original Content only - So publish here first!!!
Xomba: http://www.xomba.com/referral/777d57cl (Pays for referrals too!)
MyTripleDub: http://www.mytripledub.com/referral/777777ed (Pays for Referrals too!)
eHow: www.ehow.com (Pays great – Good traffic)
CORE OF THE SYSTEM:
After you have signed up for these 4 sites you will have everything you need to start earning money right away!
Here are the steps to take - Follow them closely!!!
1) Submit ALL your articles to "Triond" first (as they only accept "Original Content" - which means "Never before published"). Wait until you hear back from Triond by email that you have been Published (usually with 24 hours) ... then submit your content to the other 3 sites ... this will get you earning 4 times the income of any single site!!!
2) Drive Traffic to your Articles & Get Paid for that too!!! These sites listed below will PAY you for advertising your articles - A true "Win-Win"!!!! They even have a "Short-cut" button you can put on your browser to speed things up! They even automatically fill out 50-75% of the submission form for you!
SheToldMe: http://shetoldme.com/referral/73686752
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If you have done these steps you should see a substantial income from your articles, especially if you are writing a few per week. The amount you earn is up to you!!!
TIP: Do you want to be able to write articles in just a few minutes, even on topics you know little or nothing about? Try this product: "Instant Article Wizard" go to: http://paulcline7.instantaw.hop.clickbank.net/ I use this tool ALL the time! It only costs a few dollars but you will be able to write articles forever AND it will help you write on HIGH-PAYING keywords, even if you know little about them. Check it out! GREAT for research too!
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To Make Money On The Internet
To Make Money On The Internet
Money & Investments AdSense Eay google internet Money Traffic Website Yahoo youtube
From the very beginning of the internet, people have tried to think of ways to make money. The allure of having so many potential customers without the expense of having a building, paying utilities, hiring employees and commuting to work has thousands of people, yet, hundreds of thousands of people dreaming that they too could get rich by marketing on the internet.
The success stories of Ebay, YouTube, Yahoo, and Google have people of all ages, races, and locations dreaming that they too, will one day make it big. All it takes is the right idea, the right product, or the right website and you can be living the life of Bill Gates. Each day, thousands of websites are created with this as the goal.
There have been millions of informational products sold that will tell you how the author made $42, 619 in one month without doing anything but working ten minutes per day. The purchaser will buy one product and when that idea does not work, she will buy another and then another. The only person that is getting rich is the author that is selling the useless information.
Don?t get me wrong, there is some good information out there that would be beneficial to the beginner, but if you will do a little research, most of it you can find out for free. I have not found any product that will teach me how to get rich by only working a few minutes a day. If anyone wants to send me any legal product that will make me rich by only working very little, feel free to do so. I will try it out and if it works, I will pay you for the information and give you a good review on my website. However, if it does not work, well, I will review it also.
There are a couple of ways that have worked for me in the past.
Ebay is probably one of the quickest ways to make money that I have found. If you have items to sell that people actually want, within just a couple of weeks, you can be bringing in money. The hard part is finding the items to sell. Many people go to garage sales and storage building sales to find items to list there. There are also many companies that will even dropship items to your customer so that you do not have to carry an inventory. Finding a good wholesale distributor can be difficult, because there is a lot of garbage out there that you have to search through.
Adsense is also a good way to make some money. If you have a website, google will put advertisements on your website and split the profit with you. When you are just getting started with your website do not expect to make a lot of money quickly. Unless you have a lot of traffic to your website, a few dollars a day is all you can expect. This usually takes time to get going, although it is very easy to set up.
Affiliate Programs are also a way that you can make money with your website. This is also easy to set up. Companies will pay you a commission every time something is sold to a customer that came to their website from yours. If the company is compatible with yours, you could make hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month advertising for other companies on your website. Again, you must have plenty of traffic to your website, but the potential is unlimited.
As you can see, there are ways that you can make money on the internet, but do not get sucked into the get-rich-quick scams that are so prevalent on the web. Money can be made on the internet, but as many would-be millionaires have found, it can also be lost.
Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/money-investments/make-money-internet
Money & Investments AdSense Eay google internet Money Traffic Website Yahoo youtube
From the very beginning of the internet, people have tried to think of ways to make money. The allure of having so many potential customers without the expense of having a building, paying utilities, hiring employees and commuting to work has thousands of people, yet, hundreds of thousands of people dreaming that they too could get rich by marketing on the internet.
The success stories of Ebay, YouTube, Yahoo, and Google have people of all ages, races, and locations dreaming that they too, will one day make it big. All it takes is the right idea, the right product, or the right website and you can be living the life of Bill Gates. Each day, thousands of websites are created with this as the goal.
There have been millions of informational products sold that will tell you how the author made $42, 619 in one month without doing anything but working ten minutes per day. The purchaser will buy one product and when that idea does not work, she will buy another and then another. The only person that is getting rich is the author that is selling the useless information.
Don?t get me wrong, there is some good information out there that would be beneficial to the beginner, but if you will do a little research, most of it you can find out for free. I have not found any product that will teach me how to get rich by only working a few minutes a day. If anyone wants to send me any legal product that will make me rich by only working very little, feel free to do so. I will try it out and if it works, I will pay you for the information and give you a good review on my website. However, if it does not work, well, I will review it also.
There are a couple of ways that have worked for me in the past.
Ebay is probably one of the quickest ways to make money that I have found. If you have items to sell that people actually want, within just a couple of weeks, you can be bringing in money. The hard part is finding the items to sell. Many people go to garage sales and storage building sales to find items to list there. There are also many companies that will even dropship items to your customer so that you do not have to carry an inventory. Finding a good wholesale distributor can be difficult, because there is a lot of garbage out there that you have to search through.
Adsense is also a good way to make some money. If you have a website, google will put advertisements on your website and split the profit with you. When you are just getting started with your website do not expect to make a lot of money quickly. Unless you have a lot of traffic to your website, a few dollars a day is all you can expect. This usually takes time to get going, although it is very easy to set up.
Affiliate Programs are also a way that you can make money with your website. This is also easy to set up. Companies will pay you a commission every time something is sold to a customer that came to their website from yours. If the company is compatible with yours, you could make hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month advertising for other companies on your website. Again, you must have plenty of traffic to your website, but the potential is unlimited.
As you can see, there are ways that you can make money on the internet, but do not get sucked into the get-rich-quick scams that are so prevalent on the web. Money can be made on the internet, but as many would-be millionaires have found, it can also be lost.
Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/money-investments/make-money-internet
Make Easy Money on the Internet
Make Easy Money on the Internet
Money & Investments internet Make Easy Money Make Easy Money on the Internet make money
There are many online programs to teach you how to make money online, and one of them is My Online Income System.
My review of My Online Income System shows what this money making program has to offer to everybody that's looking to make easy money on the internet. You are reading this page because you're looking for a way to make easy money on the internet; I know that My Online Income System is what you need to start your online business.
You may have tried to make easy money on the internet in the past but with My Online Income System you'll only need to follow some simple steps.
My Online Income System is simple program, with a 60 day action plan that guides you step by step until you start generating sales. With MOIS you will learn everything you needed to make easy money on the internet. Its simple to follow step-by-step action plan leaves nothing out. Some people find My Online Income System a bit tedious, but the fact is that it's dumb proof.
If you just follow its action plan it will work, no matter our skills, age, or anything else.
My Online Income System breaks down every aspect of online business. If you follow every step you should be up and running in much less than 60 days making at least $50 per day, even if you are a novice.
There are many programs out there that only generate easy money to its creator.
They charge high fees and they don't teach anything that¡s useful. That's not the case of My Online Income System - it's lower priced and you probably will earn more than you've paid before the end of the 60-day plan. My Online Income System the gives you access to all the training materials at a reasonable $47 one time fee.
This program is becoming very popular due to it's effectiveness and, Kimberley is constantly adding more material to boost the earnings potential of the program.
It's not crazy to think that the price of MOIS could go up in the future - actually, my advice is that if you're interested in making easy money on the internet you should join now, before it becomes more expensive!
What's so special about My Online Income System, and why is it so great to make easy money on the internet?
My Online Income System is a step-by-step learning system that will guide you through it's 60 Day action plan until you start to generate easy mony on the internet while working just a couple of hours per day.
Each day you'll have to accomplish some tasks before moving to the next day's action plan.
Therefore, you'll be allowed to work at your own pace. You can do more than one action plan per day if you like, or you can go slower if you feel overwhelmed. Some experienced marketers may find explanations to be too thorough, but this is due to fact that this program is intended for all knowledge levels, even for complete newbies.
My Online Internet System shows you how to use Affiliate Marketing to make easy money on the internet with little or no cost using simple, proven advertising methods.
Affiliate marketing is a business model that allows anyone to earn money by promoting other peoples product, in most cases you can earn a percentage every time a product is sold. Commissions usually vary between 5% and 70% depending on the product. Hardware and electronics have lower affiliate margin, and eBooks and digital products pay the highest fees.
Many marketers try to promote digital products in the aim of earning those big commissions, but in most cases they fail due to the lack of knowledge on how to do it. My online Income System will tell you exactly what to do to succeed on this task.
To succeed online there are two elements needed: Skills and Time.
My Online Income System gives you both. MOIS provides you the knowledge needed to make easy money on the internet, with all this info you won't have to waste hours searching for info, and you won't waste your precious time on useless tasks either. Every action will bring results.
If you had to create products to sell in order to make easy money on the internet, it would take months of work before earning a cent. And maybe you would end up realizing, once the product had been completed, that nobody wanted to buy it.
With this system you can make easy money on the internet from day one - you will learn how to choose the best products to promote with surgeon precision.
If you're serious about making easy money on the internet, I recommend you join My Online Income System.
As a real user of the system I can tell you it's the easiest and quickest smartest systems to learn how to make easy money on the internet.
You are only a few minutes away of starting an online business, http://hubpages.com/_1useav72lzycp/hub/Snow-boots-Must-Have-or-No-Have-I...
Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/node/5384
Money & Investments internet Make Easy Money Make Easy Money on the Internet make money
There are many online programs to teach you how to make money online, and one of them is My Online Income System.
My review of My Online Income System shows what this money making program has to offer to everybody that's looking to make easy money on the internet. You are reading this page because you're looking for a way to make easy money on the internet; I know that My Online Income System is what you need to start your online business.
You may have tried to make easy money on the internet in the past but with My Online Income System you'll only need to follow some simple steps.
My Online Income System is simple program, with a 60 day action plan that guides you step by step until you start generating sales. With MOIS you will learn everything you needed to make easy money on the internet. Its simple to follow step-by-step action plan leaves nothing out. Some people find My Online Income System a bit tedious, but the fact is that it's dumb proof.
If you just follow its action plan it will work, no matter our skills, age, or anything else.
My Online Income System breaks down every aspect of online business. If you follow every step you should be up and running in much less than 60 days making at least $50 per day, even if you are a novice.
There are many programs out there that only generate easy money to its creator.
They charge high fees and they don't teach anything that¡s useful. That's not the case of My Online Income System - it's lower priced and you probably will earn more than you've paid before the end of the 60-day plan. My Online Income System the gives you access to all the training materials at a reasonable $47 one time fee.
This program is becoming very popular due to it's effectiveness and, Kimberley is constantly adding more material to boost the earnings potential of the program.
It's not crazy to think that the price of MOIS could go up in the future - actually, my advice is that if you're interested in making easy money on the internet you should join now, before it becomes more expensive!
What's so special about My Online Income System, and why is it so great to make easy money on the internet?
My Online Income System is a step-by-step learning system that will guide you through it's 60 Day action plan until you start to generate easy mony on the internet while working just a couple of hours per day.
Each day you'll have to accomplish some tasks before moving to the next day's action plan.
Therefore, you'll be allowed to work at your own pace. You can do more than one action plan per day if you like, or you can go slower if you feel overwhelmed. Some experienced marketers may find explanations to be too thorough, but this is due to fact that this program is intended for all knowledge levels, even for complete newbies.
My Online Internet System shows you how to use Affiliate Marketing to make easy money on the internet with little or no cost using simple, proven advertising methods.
Affiliate marketing is a business model that allows anyone to earn money by promoting other peoples product, in most cases you can earn a percentage every time a product is sold. Commissions usually vary between 5% and 70% depending on the product. Hardware and electronics have lower affiliate margin, and eBooks and digital products pay the highest fees.
Many marketers try to promote digital products in the aim of earning those big commissions, but in most cases they fail due to the lack of knowledge on how to do it. My online Income System will tell you exactly what to do to succeed on this task.
To succeed online there are two elements needed: Skills and Time.
My Online Income System gives you both. MOIS provides you the knowledge needed to make easy money on the internet, with all this info you won't have to waste hours searching for info, and you won't waste your precious time on useless tasks either. Every action will bring results.
If you had to create products to sell in order to make easy money on the internet, it would take months of work before earning a cent. And maybe you would end up realizing, once the product had been completed, that nobody wanted to buy it.
With this system you can make easy money on the internet from day one - you will learn how to choose the best products to promote with surgeon precision.
If you're serious about making easy money on the internet, I recommend you join My Online Income System.
As a real user of the system I can tell you it's the easiest and quickest smartest systems to learn how to make easy money on the internet.
You are only a few minutes away of starting an online business, http://hubpages.com/_1useav72lzycp/hub/Snow-boots-Must-Have-or-No-Have-I...
Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/node/5384
Earn Money Just Browsing The Net!!!!!!!
EARN MONEY JUST BROWSING THE NET!!
Money & Investments earn money internet make money money net
EARN MONEY JUST BROWSING THE NET and LISTENING you YOUR FAV SONGS!!
Tired of SCAM Work-At-Home jobs on the internet.This site do not require you to pay for anything.
Do not join any home based job opportunity that requires you to pay. 99% of them are scammers. And this job is 100% not one of them. This is a legit work where you will get paid for just clicking an advertisement. Why wasting your time Surfing the net w/o earning nothing?
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Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/money-investments/earn-money-just-browsing-net
Money & Investments earn money internet make money money net
EARN MONEY JUST BROWSING THE NET and LISTENING you YOUR FAV SONGS!!
Tired of SCAM Work-At-Home jobs on the internet.This site do not require you to pay for anything.
Do not join any home based job opportunity that requires you to pay. 99% of them are scammers. And this job is 100% not one of them. This is a legit work where you will get paid for just clicking an advertisement. Why wasting your time Surfing the net w/o earning nothing?
Discover an unbelievably quick and easy way to give yourself a BIG fat pay raise, without leaving your home or risking one penny of your hard-earned money...
http://www.clixsense.com/
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Thanks to the information:http://www.mytripledub.com/blog/money-investments/earn-money-just-browsing-net
Net benefit: how the Internet is transforming our World
Net benefit: how the Internet is transforming our
world1
John Naughton2
There’s a lovely Latin phrase – terra firma. It means “solid
earth”. It’s the basis for a metaphor we use a lot. We talk
approvingly about someone who has “his feet on the ground”, and
disparagingly about people who are “not properly earthed”. For
us, the earth, the ground, is something dependable, something
fixed, something immutable.
And yet for years I lived in Cambridge three doors away from a
man named Dan McKenzie who believed otherwise. Dan was a
geophysicist who thought that, far from being fixed and
immutable, the ground on which we stood was shifting. He was the
leading scientist in a small group who formulated, in 1967, the
theory of plate tectonics – the view that the earth’s surface is
comprised of a number of giant plates which are constantly in
motion, colliding with or sliding along one another.3 When they
push against one another, huge mountain ranges are created.
That’s how we got the Himalayas. And when plates scrape against
one another, as for example along the San Andreas fault in
California, we get earthquakes or tsunamis.
As it happened, Dan was right. His view of how the earth
behaves is now accepted as the truth. So while our terra may be
appear to be firma, actually it’s moving, with consequences which
1 Copyright information: this is an edited version of the Annual Lecture of the
UK Marketing Society, delivered on 28 February, 2006 at the Science Museum,
London. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, which means that it can be freely
reproduced in unchanged form for non-commercial use provided the authorship is
acknowledged. See http://creativecommons.org for details.
2 Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, the Open University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA. Email: j.j.naughton@open.ac.uk.
3 http://www.agu.org/inside/awards/bios/mckenzie_dan.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
2
are sometimes terrible – as we saw in the Asian tsunami of Boxing
Day, 2004.
There’s a simple and obvious moral here and it is this: even
when you think things are immutable, you may be wrong. Huge
changes may be taking place under our feet, but only our
grandchildren will see them clearly. Which is no consolation to
us, because we will be dead and gone by that time.
What I want to do this evening is to apply this philosophy to
thinking about our communications environment. My conjecture is
that huge, tectonic shifts are under way in this environment;
that these changes have momentous implications for our society
and its industries; and that we currently lack the tools or the
inclination to think coherently about the phenomenon.
What do I mean by “momentous implications”? Well, to
illustrate it I want you to join me in a little thought
experiment.
I want you to close your eyes and think back to 1993.
The year is 1993. John Major is Prime Minister. The Tories
are in government. Tony Blair still looks like Bambi. Bill
Clinton has just become President of the United States. Nobody’s
heard of Monica Lewinsky. Germany is still a prosperous country.
Mercedes are still the most reliable cars around. Only grown-ups
have mobile phones. Nobody – but nobody – outside of academic and
research labs has an email address. And a URL – now that is
something really exotic! Amazon is a river in South America. A
googol is the technical term for an enormous number – 1 followed
by one hundred zeroes. eBay and iPod are typos. An instant
message is something you send via a chap on a motorbike. RyanAir
is a small Irish airline which flies to airports nobody has ever
heard of. Oh, and there are quaint little shops on the High
Street called “travel agents”.
Now, open your eyes and spool forward to the present. Hands
up who doesn’t have an email address. Hands up who doesn’t use
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
3
Google. Hands up anyone whose company doesn’t have a web site.
When was the last time you saw a white van on the motorway that
didn’t have www.something.com on the back? Who hasn’t bought
books or records from Amazon? Who hasn’t thought of bidding for
something on eBay? Anyone who hasn’t booked a flight on the Web?
How many people here haven’t ordered groceries via Tesco online?
I could go on but you will get the point. 2006 is only
thirteen years on from 1993. Why did I pick that year? Because
1993 was the year that the World Wide Web took off. It had
actually been invented three years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee,
but the spring of 2003 was when the first graphical browser was
launched and the Web became something that ordinary human beings
could understand and use.4
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, nobody knows how
big the Web is. When it stopped publishing the number, Google
was claiming to index 8 billion pages, but everyone knows that
was just the tip of the iceberg. Some sensible people are
claiming that the web is 400 times bigger than the number of
pages indexed by Google. 400 times 8 is 3,200. So a publication
medium which contains over 3,000 billion pages has come into
being in little over a decade, and it’s growing by maybe 25,000
pages an hour. This is a revolutionary transformation of our
environment by any standards.
What does this mean?
The honest answer is that we haven’t a clue, and to see why I
want you to join me in another little thought experiment.
Think back to the year 1455. Why 1455? Well that was the year
when a peculiar guy living in Mainz in Germany, name of
Gutenberg, published the bible he had created using a fancy
invention called moveable type. It was the world’s first printed
book.
4 see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet,
London, 1999, Phoenix.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
4
Printing was a revolutionary transformation of mankind’s
communications environment. Up to then, books were strictly a
minority sport – the preserve of a tiny, rich and powerful elite,
centred on the Church and the aristocracy. But in time, printing
created the modern world. It undermined the authority of the
Catholic church, enabled the Reformation and the Enlightenment,
powered the rise of nationalism and of modern science, created
new social classes and stimulated the creation of the educational
system we still rely on today.
It even changed our conception of ‘childhood’ as a protected
phase in people’s lives. Before print, the definition of
adulthood was when a child reached the point where it was
competent to participate in an oral culture. In the Middle Ages,
that age was seven – which is why the Catholic Church defined
seven as the ‘age of reason’, the age at which a person could be
deemed responsible for their behaviour. (That’s why you never
see children in a Breughel painting – you just see small adults.)
But in a print-based culture, it took longer to get kids to the
point where they could competently participate in the business of
life. So ‘childhood’ was extended effectively until the age of
14 – which as you know was the original school-leaving age.5
Now all of this flowed from Gutenberg’s invention in 1455.
But neither he nor his contemporaries could have had any idea
what it would lead to. And if you imagine a MORI pollster going
around Mainz in 1468 with a clipboard and asking citizens for
their opinion of what the long term impact of the technology
would be, well you can see how absurd the idea is.
All of which leads me to formulate Naughton’s First Law. It
says that we invariably over-estimate the short-term implications
of new communications technologies, and we greviously underestimate
their long term impacts.
5 See Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Vintage, 1994.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
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The great Internet Bubble of 1995 – 2000 was based on crazy
over-estimates of short-term impacts leading to what one
economist memorably christened “irrational exuberance”6. But
we’ve been though all that, and emerged sadder, poorer and I hope
wiser. Now is the time to turn to longer-term implications.
So in what follows I’m going to think aloud about what these
might be. And the reason I’ve gone on at some length about
printing is to provide a health warning. I don’t know what the
future holds any more than the next academic. But what I can do
is suggest some ways of thinking about it.
~oOo~
The conventional way of thinking about this stuff is what the
computer scientist John Seely Brown7 calls “endism” – the
perspective that sees new technologies as replacing or even
wiping out older ones. Thus at the moment we see a great deal of
angst in the newspaper business about whether online news sites
will wipe out newspapers. Well, maybe they will, but that has
more to do with classified advertising than with news. The truth
is that the interactions between old and new communications
technologies are actually very complex.
For example, when the CD-ROM arrived, people predicted the
demise of the printed book. It didn’t happen. In fact, books
are doing quite nicely. When TV arrived, people predicted the
end of radio and indeed of movies. It didn’t happen. Radio and
movies are doing quite nicely, thank you. TV news was going to
wipe out newspapers. It didn’t happen. And so on.
But at the same time something happened. Although the CD-ROM
didn’t wipe out the printed book it did change forever the
prospects for expensive reference works. Remember Encyclopedia
6 Robert J Schiller: Irrational Exuberance, Princeton University Press, 2000.
7 John Seely Brown and Andrew Duguid: The Social Life of Information, Harvard
Business School Press, 2000. See
http://www.sociallifeofinformation.com/toc.htm for contents and downloadable
chapters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
6
Brittannica? And as for videotapes and DVD, well the movie
studios now make more revenue from them than they do from
cinemas. And so on.
So where do we find an intellectual framework which captures
the complexity of these interactions? The answer was suggested
many years ago by the late Neil Postman, a Professor at New York
University who was the most perceptive critic of media and
communications technology since Marshall McLuhan. In a series of
witty and thought-provoking books – with titles like Teaching as
a Subversive Activity, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The
Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly -- Postman described
how our societies are shaped by their prevailing modes of
communication, and fretted about the consequences.
In seeking a language in which to talk about change, I’ve
borrowed an idea from Postman – the notion of media ecology, that
is to say, the study of media as environments. The term is
borrowed from the sciences, where an ecosystem is defined as a
dynamic system in which living organisms interact with one
another and with their environment.8 These interactions can be
very complex and take many forms. Organisms prey on one another;
compete for food and other nutrients; have parasitic or symbiotic
relationships; wax and wane; prosper and decline. And an
ecosystem is never static. The system may be in equilibrium at
any given moment, but the balance is precarious. The slightest
perturbation may disturb it, resulting in a new set of
interactions and movement to another – temporary – point of
equilibrium.
This seems to me to be a more insightful way of viewing our
communications environment than the conventional ‘market’
metaphor commonly used in public discussion, because it comes
closer to capturing the complexity of what actually goes on in
real life.
8 W.B. Clapham: Natural Ecosystems, New York, Macmillan, 1973.
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7
A good illustration of ecological adaptation comes from the
interaction between television and newspapers in the UK. There
came a point – sometime in the late 1950s – when more people in
Britain got their news from TV than from newspapers. This
created a crisis for the papers. How should they respond to the
threat? Well, basically they reacted in two different ways. The
popular papers – the ones with mass circulations and readers
lower down the social scale -- essentially became parasitic
feeders on television and the cult of celebrity that it spawned.
(They’re now also parasitic feeders on Premiership football.)
The broadsheets, for their part, decided that if they could no
longer be the first with the news, then they would instead become
providers of comment, analysis and, later, of features. In other
words, television news did not wipe out British newspapers. But
it forced them to adapt and move to a different place in the
ecosystem.
The ‘organisms’ in our media ecosystem include broadcast and
narrowcast television, movies, radio, print and the Internet
(which itself encompasses the Web, email and peer-to-peer
networking of various kinds). For most of our lives, the
dominant organism in this system – the one that grabbed most of
the resources, revenue and attention – was broadcast TV. Note
that ‘broadcast’ implies few-to-many: a relatively small number
of broadcasters, transmitting content to billions of essentially
passive viewers and listeners.
This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us
grew up. But it’s in the process of radical change.
How come? Answer: because broadcast TV is in inexorable
decline. Its audience is fragmenting. Twenty years ago, a show
like The Two Ronnies could attract audiences of up to 20 million
in the UK. Now an audience of five million is considered a
stupendous success by any television channel. In five years’
time, 200,000 viewers will be considered a miracle.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
8
Broadcast TV is being eaten from within: the worm in the bud
in this case is narrowcast digital television -- in which
specialist content is aimed at specialised, subscription-based
audiences and distributed via digital channels. But waiting in
the wings is something even more devastating – Internet Protocol
TV (IPtv) – which is technospeak for television on demand,
delivered to consumers via the Internet. And it’s coming fairly
soon to a computer monitor near you.
The trouble for broadcast TV is that its business model is
based on its ability to attract and hold mass audiences. Once
audiences become fragmented, the commercial logic erodes.
And that’s not all. New technologies like Personal Video
Recorders (PVRs) – essentially recorders which use hard drives
rather than tape and are much easier to program – are enabling
viewers to determine their own viewing schedules and – more
significantly – to avoid advertisements. Think of Sky Plus.
Think of TiVO. As the CEO of Yahoo said recently at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the era of “appointment-to-view”
TV is coming to an end.
Note that when I say that broadcast TV is declining, I am NOT
saying that it will disappear. That’s what John Seely Brown
calls “endism’ and it’s not the way ecologists think. Broadcast
will continue to exist, for the simple and very good reason that
some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology.
Only a broadcast model can deal with something like a World Cup
final or a major terrorist attack, for example – when the
attention of the world is focussed on a single event or a single
place. But broadcast will lose its dominant position in the
ecosystem, and that is the change that I think will have really
profound consequences for us all.
~oOo~
What will replace broadcast TV as the new dominant organism in
our media ecosystem? Simple: the ubiquitous Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
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Note that I do not say the Web. The biggest mistake people in
the media business make is to think that the Net and the Web are
synonymous.
They’re not. Of course the Web – as I intimated earlier -- is
enormous, but it’s just one kind of traffic that runs on the
Internet’s tracks and signalling. And already the Web is being
dwarfed by other kinds of traffic. According to data gathered by
the Cambridge firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer networking traffic
now exceeds Web traffic by a factor of between two and ten,
depending on the time of day. And I’ve no doubt that in ten
years’ time, P2P traffic will be outrun by some other ingenious
networking application, as yet undiscovered.
Already the signs of the Net’s approaching centrality are
everywhere. We see it, for example,
• in the astonishing penetration of broadband access in
developed countries,
• in the explosive growth of e-commerce,
• in the streaming of audio – and, increasingly, video
across the Net,
• in the sudden interest of Rupert Murdoch and other
broadcasters in acquiring broadband companies,
• in declining newspaper sales and the growth of online
news
• and in the stupendous growth of internet telephony –
spurred by the realisation that, sooner rather than
later, all voice telephony will be done over the Net.9
9 “It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional
telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry
are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony
will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive
to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in
short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape.” Economist, 15
September, 2005.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
10
Oh and I almost forgot to mention the looming implications
of Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) technology, together with Wi-
Fi and mesh networking.
And then there’s the fact that you can now buy episodes of
popular US TV series on the Apple iTunes store, download them
onto your computer – and watch them on your sparkling new Video
iPod.
Oh and there’s BBC Radio’s “listen again” facility, whereby if
you miss a programme (the Archers, say) you can always click on a
link and have it streamed to your computer at a time that suits
you.
And I haven’t mentioned, have I, that you can do the same for
24 hours with BBC2’s Newsnight programme?
And of course there’s Google, a phenomenon that deserves an
entire lecture to itself.
~oOo~
What does this mean?
Well, first of all, these developments illustrate the extent
to which the Internet is becoming central to our lives.
In 1999, Andy Grove, who was then the CEO of Intel, made a
famous prediction. In five years’ time, he said, all companies
will be Internet companies or they won’t be companies at all.10
At the time, people laughed. Did he mean that every hamburger
joint and hardware store would have to be online by 2004? What a
ridiculous idea!
In fact it was an exceedingly insightful prediction. What
Grove meant was that the Internet would move from being something
rather exotic to being a kind of utility like electricity or the
telephone. None of us today could envisage being in business
without making use of both. As the Economist, put it,
10 Economist, 24 June, 1999
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
11
“The Internet is helping companies to lower costs
dramatically across their supply and demand chains, take
their customer service into a different league, enter new
markets, create additional revenue streams and redefine
their business relationships. What Mr Grove was really
saying was that if in five years’ time a company is not
using the Internet to do some or all of these things, it
will be destroyed by competitors who are.”11
The point of all this is that while we grew up and came to
maturity in a media ecosystem dominated by broadcast TV, our
children and grandchildren will live in an environment dominated
by the Net. And the interesting question – the point, in a way,
of this lecture – is what will that mean for us, and for them?
~oOo~
In thinking about the future, the two most useful words are
‘push’ and ‘pull’ because they capture the essence of where we’ve
been and where we’re headed.
Broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium. By that I mean that a
relatively select band of producers (broadcasters) decide what
content is to be created, create it and then push it down
analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to
consist of essentially passive recipients.
The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this
world. He did, of course, have some freedom of action. He could
choose to switch off the TV; but if he decided to leave it on,
then essentially his freedom of action was confined to choosing
from a menu of options decided for him by others, and to
‘consuming’ their content at times decided by them. He was, in
other words, a human surrogate for one of BF Skinner’s pigeons –
free to peck at whatever coloured lever took his fancy, but not
free at all in comparison with his fellow-pigeon perched outside
on the roof.
11 ibid.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
12
The other essential feature of the world of push media was its
fundamental asymmetry. All the creative energy was assumed to be
located at one end (the producer/broadcaster). The viewer or
listener was assumed to be incapable of, or uninterested in,
creating content; and even if it turned out that he was capable
of creative activity, there was no way in which anything he
produced could have been published.
Looking back, the most astonishing thing about the broadcastdominated
world was how successful it was for so long in keeping
billions of people in thrall. Networks could pull in audiences
in the tens of millions for successful and popular broadcasts –
and pitch their advertising rates accordingly. Small wonder that
one owner of a UK ITV franchise (I think it was Roy Thompson)
described commercial television (in public) as “a licence to
print money”.
But in fact the dominance of the push model was an artefact of
the state of technology. Analogue transmission technology
severely limited the number of channels that could be broadcast
through the ether, so consumer choice was restricted by the laws
of analogue electronics. The advent of (analogue) cable and
satellite transmission and, later, digital technology changed all
that and began to hollow-out the push model from within.
The Internet – and particularly the Web – is exactly the
opposite of this. The Web is a pull medium. Nothing comes to
you unless you choose it and click on it to ‘pull’ it down onto
your computer. You’re in charge. In the words of Rupert
Murdoch’s daughter, Elizabeth, the Web is a “sit up” medium, in
contrast to TV, which is a “sit back” medium.
So the first implication of the switch from push to pull is a
radical increase in consumer sovereignty. We saw this early on
in e-commerce, because it became easy to compare online prices
and locate the most competitive suppliers from the comfort of
your own armchair. Just one illustration: over 80 per cent of
prospective customers nowadays turn up at Ford dealerships in the
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
13
US armed not only with information about particular models, but
also with detailed data on the prices that dealers elsewhere in
the country are charging for those models.12
We’re now seeing this in other areas too – for example in the
way prospective students click their way through the websites of
competing universities while deciding which ones to apply to.
But the Internet doesn’t just enable people to become more
fickle and choosy consumers. It also makes them much better
informed – or at least provides them with formidable resources
with which to become more knowledgeable. Search technology is
the key to this. In an interesting recent book, The Search, John
Battelle describes the dramatic effects that search engines like
Google are having on the advertising and marketing industries.
“In the past few years”, he writes, “search has become a
universally understood method of navigating our
information universe: much as the Windows interface
defined our interactions with the personal computer,
search defines our interactions with the Internet. Put a
search box in front of just about anybody, and he’ll know
what to do with it. And the aggregate of all those
searches, it turns out, is knowable: it constitutes the
database of our intentions”. 13
The Internet and related communications technologies are
making people more connected. The average person today interacts
with far more people than her father did. As the Economist puts
it in a recent article:
“A famous 1967 study by Stanley Milgram (which
later became the basis for a film) suggested that
there were at most “six degrees of separation”
between any two people in America, meaning that the
12 “Crowned at last”, Economist, 31 March, 2005.
13 John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of
Business and Transformed Our Culture, Portfolio, 2005, page 4.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
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chain of acquaintances between them never had more
than six links. According to more recent work along
similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6,
despite the growth in America's population since
Milgram's study. Being able to keep in touch with a
much wider range of people through technologies
such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.”14
The Internet is also making it much harder for companies to
keep secrets. If one of your products has flaws, or if a service
you provide is sub-standard, then the chances are that the news
will appear somewhere on a Blog or a posting to a newsgroup or
email list. There was a celebrated case of this some time ago
with Kryptonite bike locks which – it turned out – could be
opened by anyone equipped with a Bic biro. The company knew of
the flaw, but did nothing until news of it was published on a
cycling website. And then all hell broke loose.15
And in the last few months, the giant Sony corporation has
been crucified because of the discovery – first published on a
Blog – that copy-protection software on Sony music disks was
covertly installing software on customers’ PCs which could
compromise their security. It’s not clear exactly when Sony had
become aware of the problem but when the story finally broke --
on a techie’s Blog -- the company’s various inept attempts at
denial and damage-limitation were relentlessly exposed and
discredited by enraged consumers hunting in virtual packs.16
My conjecture therefore is that nobody who offers a public
service will be immune from this aspect of a ubiquitous Net. And
with every day that passes we see other examples. Take for
instance the maddening hypocrisy of companies whose call centres
14 “The New Organisation”, Economist, 21 January, 2006.
15 “Lock, stock and caught over a barrel”, Observer, 26 September, 2004. Online
at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1312736,00.html
16 See “How Sony became an Ugly Sister”, Observer, 18 December, 2005. Online at
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1669722,00.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
15
give you a recorded message saying that they really value your
call and then drag you through a Kafkaesque maze for 20 minutes
before you get even a chance to talk to a human being. There’s
now a useful website17 on which users post the key codes needed to
bypass the maze. For Citibank in the US, for example, the
sequence you need is 0#0#0#0#0#0#! And the name of this site?
Why www.gethuman.com
Some years ago, I gave a presentation at a seminar in
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on the future of information
technology and how it might affect the health service.
The thing I remember most from the event is a statement made
by a quietly-spoken medical researcher from the National
Institute of Health. The biggest challenge General Practitioners
will face in 2010, he said, was “how to deal with the Internetinformed
patient”.
And I don’t think he was joking.
The emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus
one of the implications of an Internet-centric world. The days
when companies could assume that the only really demanding
customers they were likely to encounter were those who subscribed
to Which? are over.
Another implication is that the asymmetry of the old, pushmedia
world may be replaced by something much more balanced.
Remember that the underlying assumption of the old broadcast
model was that audiences are passive and uncreative.
What we’re now discovering is that that passivity and apparent
lack of creativity may have been more due to the absence of tools
and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human
nature. Certainly, that’s the only explanation I can think of
for what’s been happening on the Net in the last few years.
17 http://www.gethuman.com/us/
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
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Take Blogging – the practice of keeping an online diary.
There are millions and millions of the things – when I last
checked the other night Technorati, a Blog-tracking service, was
claiming to be monitoring over 28.9 million, and the number of
them is doubling every five and a half months. The current
creation rate is 75,000 a day – that’s about one a second.18 Many
of them are, as you might expect, mere dross – vanity publishing
with no discernible literary or intellectual merit. But
something like 13 million Blogs were still being updated three
months after their initial creation, and many of them contain
writing and thinking of a very high order. In my own areas of
professional interest, for example, Blogs are always my most
trusted online sources, because I know many of the people who
write them, and some of them are world experts in their fields.19
What is significant about the Blogging phenomenon is its
demonstration that the traffic in ideas and cultural products
isn’t a one-way street – as it was in the old push-media ecology.
People have always been thoughtful and articulate and wellinformed,
but up to now relatively few of them ever made it past
the gatekeepers who controlled access to publication media.
Blogging software and the Internet gave them the platform they
needed – and boy have they grasped the opportunity!
The other remarkable explosion of creativity comes from
digital photography. In the last few years an enormous number of
digital cameras have been sold – and of course many mobile phones
now come with an onboard camera. The trend is so pronounced that
even the biggest names in photography are getting out of film.
Kodak decided to stop making film cameras some time ago.
Recently, Nikon announced that it was planning the same thing.
18 Dave Sifri, “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006”, online at
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/02/81.html
19 For example, Professor Ed Felten of Princeton, a leading expert on digital
rights management, encryption and related issues whose Blog
(http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) is a must-read for anyone interested in
these arcane but important matters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
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And Konica Minolta has now announced that it too is going
completely digital.
So every day, millions of digital photographs are taken.
Until the advent of a site called Flickr.com, an understandable
response to this statement would have been “so what?” But Flickr
allows people to upload their pictures and display them on the
Web, each neatly resized and allocated its own unique URL. And
it has grown like crazy – to the point where it was acquired by
Yahoo20 in March 2005 for an undisclosed pile of serious money.
I don’t know how many photographs Flickr holds, but it already
run into many millions.21 For me, the most interesting aspect of
it is that users are encouraged to attach tags to their pictures,
and these tags can be used as the basis for searches of the
entire database. The other day I searched for photographs tagged
with ‘Ireland’ and came up with 122,000 images! (A month
earlier, the same search had come up with 85,000.) Of course I
didn’t sift through them all, but I must have looked at a few
hundred. They were mostly holiday and casual snapshots, but here
and there were some truly beautiful images. What struck me most,
though, was what they represented. Ten years ago, those
snapshots would have wound up in a shoebox and would certainly
never have been seen in a public forum. But now they can be –
and are being – published, shared with others, made available to
the world. And this is something new. And something important
for those of us who aspire to reach audiences with our messages.
~oOo~
What I’m really trying to say is that the world has changed
out of all recognition already. And if I’m right about the
20 “A Flickr of the digital camera switch and the folksonomy system is born”,
Observer, 27 November, 2005. Online at:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1651448,00.html
21 In December 2004, Salon.com was reporting 2.2 million and growing at a rate
of 30,000 per day. See http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/12/20/flickr/.
These estimates are now seriously out of date.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
18
analogy with printing, this is just the beginning. We ain’t seen
nothin’ yet.
Now it would be impertinent of me to try to spell out what all
this might mean for you. You know your own business best. But
here’s a salutary tale and a closing thought.
The thought is that no industry can afford to ignore what’s
going on, even if it thinks that the Internet is nothing to do
with it.
If you want a case study of this, consider what happened to
the music industry.
In the early 1980s, recorded music went digital with the
arrival of the compact disk. Recording studios pumped out music
as streams of ones and zeroes; and at the consumer end, CD
players translated those ones and zeroes back into sounds. The
problem was: how to get those ones and zeroes – those digital
bitstreams – from studio to player. The solution was to burn the
bits onto plastic disks and distribute those to consumers. That
meant making the disks, burning the music onto them, printing
labels, packing them into boxes (which always seemed to break),
packing the boxes into bigger boxes, putting those on pallets,
loading the pallets onto trucks, delivering them to warehouses,
who then delivered them to retailers, who took the disks out of
the boxes and put the boxes on display and… I could go on, but
you will see what a wasteful, inefficient, brain-dead way that
was for distributing a product.
Nevertheless, the record industry built a very cosy business
out of this. There was one small problem: the economics of
producing and shipping disks meant that there was little
commercial mileage in selling single tracks, so the industry
focussed on selling albums and increasingly ignored the consumer
demand for tracks. And it might have continued doing this
forever, but for one thing: the Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
19
In 1999 a disaffected music lover called Shawn Fanning sat
down and wrote some software which enabled people easily to
locate and share music tracks over the Net. He called it
Napster. Within 18 months, Napster had 80 million subscribers,
swapping millions of tracks every hour of every day. The music
industry eventually got Napster shut down, but by then the genie
was out of the bottle. And even today, as I speak, millions of
music tracks are being illicitly shared across the Net (remember
that CacheLogic survey of Internet traffic), and the only hope
for the music industry is to fall in with the legal downloading
services offered by companies like Apple with its iTunes Store.
Since it opened the store, Apple has sold a million tracks a day,
and last week celebrated the sale of its billionth song.
One of the defensive arguments used by the record companies to
justify their existence – not to mention their stock options --
was that only they could find and nurture talent. Without them,
so they implied, the Rolling Stones and U2 would still be playing
in pubs, clubs and student raves. Well, I don’t know if you’ve
heard of a Sheffield band called the Arctic Monkeys, but I’m
willing to bet your kids have. They’ve suddenly become the
biggest band in Britain. And they did it by releasing their
music – free – on their website, and letting fans spread it by
word of mouth. Eventually a record label came begging to be
allowed to take them on. It is bands like Arctic Monkeys, not
record companies, that are the future of the music business.
Nobody is indispensable any more.
The moral of the story is that you ignore changes in the
communications ecology at your peril. Remember what Andy Grove
said all those years ago. Companies that are not Internet
companies won’t be companies at all.
For information getting:UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
1
Net benefit: how the Internet is transforming our
world1
John Naughton2
There’s a lovely Latin phrase – terra firma. It means “solid
earth”. It’s the basis for a metaphor we use a lot. We talk
approvingly about someone who has “his feet on the ground”, and
disparagingly about people who are “not properly earthed”. For
us, the earth, the ground, is something dependable, something
fixed, something immutable.
And yet for years I lived in Cambridge three doors away from a
man named Dan McKenzie who believed otherwise. Dan was a
geophysicist who thought that, far from being fixed and
immutable, the ground on which we stood was shifting. He was the
leading scientist in a small group who formulated, in 1967, the
theory of plate tectonics – the view that the earth’s surface is
comprised of a number of giant plates which are constantly in
motion, colliding with or sliding along one another.3 When they
push against one another, huge mountain ranges are created.
That’s how we got the Himalayas. And when plates scrape against
one another, as for example along the San Andreas fault in
California, we get earthquakes or tsunamis.
As it happened, Dan was right. His view of how the earth
behaves is now accepted as the truth. So while our terra may be
appear to be firma, actually it’s moving, with consequences which
1 Copyright information: this is an edited version of the Annual Lecture of the
UK Marketing Society, delivered on 28 February, 2006 at the Science Museum,
London. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, which means that it can be freely
reproduced in unchanged form for non-commercial use provided the authorship is
acknowledged. See http://creativecommons.org for details.
2 Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, the Open University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA. Email: j.j.naughton@open.ac.uk.
3 http://www.agu.org/inside/awards/bios/mckenzie_dan.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
2
are sometimes terrible – as we saw in the Asian tsunami of Boxing
Day, 2004.
There’s a simple and obvious moral here and it is this: even
when you think things are immutable, you may be wrong. Huge
changes may be taking place under our feet, but only our
grandchildren will see them clearly. Which is no consolation to
us, because we will be dead and gone by that time.
What I want to do this evening is to apply this philosophy to
thinking about our communications environment. My conjecture is
that huge, tectonic shifts are under way in this environment;
that these changes have momentous implications for our society
and its industries; and that we currently lack the tools or the
inclination to think coherently about the phenomenon.
What do I mean by “momentous implications”? Well, to
illustrate it I want you to join me in a little thought
experiment.
I want you to close your eyes and think back to 1993.
The year is 1993. John Major is Prime Minister. The Tories
are in government. Tony Blair still looks like Bambi. Bill
Clinton has just become President of the United States. Nobody’s
heard of Monica Lewinsky. Germany is still a prosperous country.
Mercedes are still the most reliable cars around. Only grown-ups
have mobile phones. Nobody – but nobody – outside of academic and
research labs has an email address. And a URL – now that is
something really exotic! Amazon is a river in South America. A
googol is the technical term for an enormous number – 1 followed
by one hundred zeroes. eBay and iPod are typos. An instant
message is something you send via a chap on a motorbike. RyanAir
is a small Irish airline which flies to airports nobody has ever
heard of. Oh, and there are quaint little shops on the High
Street called “travel agents”.
Now, open your eyes and spool forward to the present. Hands
up who doesn’t have an email address. Hands up who doesn’t use
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
3
Google. Hands up anyone whose company doesn’t have a web site.
When was the last time you saw a white van on the motorway that
didn’t have www.something.com on the back? Who hasn’t bought
books or records from Amazon? Who hasn’t thought of bidding for
something on eBay? Anyone who hasn’t booked a flight on the Web?
How many people here haven’t ordered groceries via Tesco online?
I could go on but you will get the point. 2006 is only
thirteen years on from 1993. Why did I pick that year? Because
1993 was the year that the World Wide Web took off. It had
actually been invented three years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee,
but the spring of 2003 was when the first graphical browser was
launched and the Web became something that ordinary human beings
could understand and use.4
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, nobody knows how
big the Web is. When it stopped publishing the number, Google
was claiming to index 8 billion pages, but everyone knows that
was just the tip of the iceberg. Some sensible people are
claiming that the web is 400 times bigger than the number of
pages indexed by Google. 400 times 8 is 3,200. So a publication
medium which contains over 3,000 billion pages has come into
being in little over a decade, and it’s growing by maybe 25,000
pages an hour. This is a revolutionary transformation of our
environment by any standards.
What does this mean?
The honest answer is that we haven’t a clue, and to see why I
want you to join me in another little thought experiment.
Think back to the year 1455. Why 1455? Well that was the year
when a peculiar guy living in Mainz in Germany, name of
Gutenberg, published the bible he had created using a fancy
invention called moveable type. It was the world’s first printed
book.
4 see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet,
London, 1999, Phoenix.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
4
Printing was a revolutionary transformation of mankind’s
communications environment. Up to then, books were strictly a
minority sport – the preserve of a tiny, rich and powerful elite,
centred on the Church and the aristocracy. But in time, printing
created the modern world. It undermined the authority of the
Catholic church, enabled the Reformation and the Enlightenment,
powered the rise of nationalism and of modern science, created
new social classes and stimulated the creation of the educational
system we still rely on today.
It even changed our conception of ‘childhood’ as a protected
phase in people’s lives. Before print, the definition of
adulthood was when a child reached the point where it was
competent to participate in an oral culture. In the Middle Ages,
that age was seven – which is why the Catholic Church defined
seven as the ‘age of reason’, the age at which a person could be
deemed responsible for their behaviour. (That’s why you never
see children in a Breughel painting – you just see small adults.)
But in a print-based culture, it took longer to get kids to the
point where they could competently participate in the business of
life. So ‘childhood’ was extended effectively until the age of
14 – which as you know was the original school-leaving age.5
Now all of this flowed from Gutenberg’s invention in 1455.
But neither he nor his contemporaries could have had any idea
what it would lead to. And if you imagine a MORI pollster going
around Mainz in 1468 with a clipboard and asking citizens for
their opinion of what the long term impact of the technology
would be, well you can see how absurd the idea is.
All of which leads me to formulate Naughton’s First Law. It
says that we invariably over-estimate the short-term implications
of new communications technologies, and we greviously underestimate
their long term impacts.
5 See Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Vintage, 1994.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
5
The great Internet Bubble of 1995 – 2000 was based on crazy
over-estimates of short-term impacts leading to what one
economist memorably christened “irrational exuberance”6. But
we’ve been though all that, and emerged sadder, poorer and I hope
wiser. Now is the time to turn to longer-term implications.
So in what follows I’m going to think aloud about what these
might be. And the reason I’ve gone on at some length about
printing is to provide a health warning. I don’t know what the
future holds any more than the next academic. But what I can do
is suggest some ways of thinking about it.
~oOo~
The conventional way of thinking about this stuff is what the
computer scientist John Seely Brown7 calls “endism” – the
perspective that sees new technologies as replacing or even
wiping out older ones. Thus at the moment we see a great deal of
angst in the newspaper business about whether online news sites
will wipe out newspapers. Well, maybe they will, but that has
more to do with classified advertising than with news. The truth
is that the interactions between old and new communications
technologies are actually very complex.
For example, when the CD-ROM arrived, people predicted the
demise of the printed book. It didn’t happen. In fact, books
are doing quite nicely. When TV arrived, people predicted the
end of radio and indeed of movies. It didn’t happen. Radio and
movies are doing quite nicely, thank you. TV news was going to
wipe out newspapers. It didn’t happen. And so on.
But at the same time something happened. Although the CD-ROM
didn’t wipe out the printed book it did change forever the
prospects for expensive reference works. Remember Encyclopedia
6 Robert J Schiller: Irrational Exuberance, Princeton University Press, 2000.
7 John Seely Brown and Andrew Duguid: The Social Life of Information, Harvard
Business School Press, 2000. See
http://www.sociallifeofinformation.com/toc.htm for contents and downloadable
chapters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
6
Brittannica? And as for videotapes and DVD, well the movie
studios now make more revenue from them than they do from
cinemas. And so on.
So where do we find an intellectual framework which captures
the complexity of these interactions? The answer was suggested
many years ago by the late Neil Postman, a Professor at New York
University who was the most perceptive critic of media and
communications technology since Marshall McLuhan. In a series of
witty and thought-provoking books – with titles like Teaching as
a Subversive Activity, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The
Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly -- Postman described
how our societies are shaped by their prevailing modes of
communication, and fretted about the consequences.
In seeking a language in which to talk about change, I’ve
borrowed an idea from Postman – the notion of media ecology, that
is to say, the study of media as environments. The term is
borrowed from the sciences, where an ecosystem is defined as a
dynamic system in which living organisms interact with one
another and with their environment.8 These interactions can be
very complex and take many forms. Organisms prey on one another;
compete for food and other nutrients; have parasitic or symbiotic
relationships; wax and wane; prosper and decline. And an
ecosystem is never static. The system may be in equilibrium at
any given moment, but the balance is precarious. The slightest
perturbation may disturb it, resulting in a new set of
interactions and movement to another – temporary – point of
equilibrium.
This seems to me to be a more insightful way of viewing our
communications environment than the conventional ‘market’
metaphor commonly used in public discussion, because it comes
closer to capturing the complexity of what actually goes on in
real life.
8 W.B. Clapham: Natural Ecosystems, New York, Macmillan, 1973.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
7
A good illustration of ecological adaptation comes from the
interaction between television and newspapers in the UK. There
came a point – sometime in the late 1950s – when more people in
Britain got their news from TV than from newspapers. This
created a crisis for the papers. How should they respond to the
threat? Well, basically they reacted in two different ways. The
popular papers – the ones with mass circulations and readers
lower down the social scale -- essentially became parasitic
feeders on television and the cult of celebrity that it spawned.
(They’re now also parasitic feeders on Premiership football.)
The broadsheets, for their part, decided that if they could no
longer be the first with the news, then they would instead become
providers of comment, analysis and, later, of features. In other
words, television news did not wipe out British newspapers. But
it forced them to adapt and move to a different place in the
ecosystem.
The ‘organisms’ in our media ecosystem include broadcast and
narrowcast television, movies, radio, print and the Internet
(which itself encompasses the Web, email and peer-to-peer
networking of various kinds). For most of our lives, the
dominant organism in this system – the one that grabbed most of
the resources, revenue and attention – was broadcast TV. Note
that ‘broadcast’ implies few-to-many: a relatively small number
of broadcasters, transmitting content to billions of essentially
passive viewers and listeners.
This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us
grew up. But it’s in the process of radical change.
How come? Answer: because broadcast TV is in inexorable
decline. Its audience is fragmenting. Twenty years ago, a show
like The Two Ronnies could attract audiences of up to 20 million
in the UK. Now an audience of five million is considered a
stupendous success by any television channel. In five years’
time, 200,000 viewers will be considered a miracle.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
8
Broadcast TV is being eaten from within: the worm in the bud
in this case is narrowcast digital television -- in which
specialist content is aimed at specialised, subscription-based
audiences and distributed via digital channels. But waiting in
the wings is something even more devastating – Internet Protocol
TV (IPtv) – which is technospeak for television on demand,
delivered to consumers via the Internet. And it’s coming fairly
soon to a computer monitor near you.
The trouble for broadcast TV is that its business model is
based on its ability to attract and hold mass audiences. Once
audiences become fragmented, the commercial logic erodes.
And that’s not all. New technologies like Personal Video
Recorders (PVRs) – essentially recorders which use hard drives
rather than tape and are much easier to program – are enabling
viewers to determine their own viewing schedules and – more
significantly – to avoid advertisements. Think of Sky Plus.
Think of TiVO. As the CEO of Yahoo said recently at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the era of “appointment-to-view”
TV is coming to an end.
Note that when I say that broadcast TV is declining, I am NOT
saying that it will disappear. That’s what John Seely Brown
calls “endism’ and it’s not the way ecologists think. Broadcast
will continue to exist, for the simple and very good reason that
some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology.
Only a broadcast model can deal with something like a World Cup
final or a major terrorist attack, for example – when the
attention of the world is focussed on a single event or a single
place. But broadcast will lose its dominant position in the
ecosystem, and that is the change that I think will have really
profound consequences for us all.
~oOo~
What will replace broadcast TV as the new dominant organism in
our media ecosystem? Simple: the ubiquitous Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
9
Note that I do not say the Web. The biggest mistake people in
the media business make is to think that the Net and the Web are
synonymous.
They’re not. Of course the Web – as I intimated earlier -- is
enormous, but it’s just one kind of traffic that runs on the
Internet’s tracks and signalling. And already the Web is being
dwarfed by other kinds of traffic. According to data gathered by
the Cambridge firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer networking traffic
now exceeds Web traffic by a factor of between two and ten,
depending on the time of day. And I’ve no doubt that in ten
years’ time, P2P traffic will be outrun by some other ingenious
networking application, as yet undiscovered.
Already the signs of the Net’s approaching centrality are
everywhere. We see it, for example,
• in the astonishing penetration of broadband access in
developed countries,
• in the explosive growth of e-commerce,
• in the streaming of audio – and, increasingly, video
across the Net,
• in the sudden interest of Rupert Murdoch and other
broadcasters in acquiring broadband companies,
• in declining newspaper sales and the growth of online
news
• and in the stupendous growth of internet telephony –
spurred by the realisation that, sooner rather than
later, all voice telephony will be done over the Net.9
9 “It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional
telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry
are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony
will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive
to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in
short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape.” Economist, 15
September, 2005.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
10
Oh and I almost forgot to mention the looming implications
of Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) technology, together with Wi-
Fi and mesh networking.
And then there’s the fact that you can now buy episodes of
popular US TV series on the Apple iTunes store, download them
onto your computer – and watch them on your sparkling new Video
iPod.
Oh and there’s BBC Radio’s “listen again” facility, whereby if
you miss a programme (the Archers, say) you can always click on a
link and have it streamed to your computer at a time that suits
you.
And I haven’t mentioned, have I, that you can do the same for
24 hours with BBC2’s Newsnight programme?
And of course there’s Google, a phenomenon that deserves an
entire lecture to itself.
~oOo~
What does this mean?
Well, first of all, these developments illustrate the extent
to which the Internet is becoming central to our lives.
In 1999, Andy Grove, who was then the CEO of Intel, made a
famous prediction. In five years’ time, he said, all companies
will be Internet companies or they won’t be companies at all.10
At the time, people laughed. Did he mean that every hamburger
joint and hardware store would have to be online by 2004? What a
ridiculous idea!
In fact it was an exceedingly insightful prediction. What
Grove meant was that the Internet would move from being something
rather exotic to being a kind of utility like electricity or the
telephone. None of us today could envisage being in business
without making use of both. As the Economist, put it,
10 Economist, 24 June, 1999
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
11
“The Internet is helping companies to lower costs
dramatically across their supply and demand chains, take
their customer service into a different league, enter new
markets, create additional revenue streams and redefine
their business relationships. What Mr Grove was really
saying was that if in five years’ time a company is not
using the Internet to do some or all of these things, it
will be destroyed by competitors who are.”11
The point of all this is that while we grew up and came to
maturity in a media ecosystem dominated by broadcast TV, our
children and grandchildren will live in an environment dominated
by the Net. And the interesting question – the point, in a way,
of this lecture – is what will that mean for us, and for them?
~oOo~
In thinking about the future, the two most useful words are
‘push’ and ‘pull’ because they capture the essence of where we’ve
been and where we’re headed.
Broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium. By that I mean that a
relatively select band of producers (broadcasters) decide what
content is to be created, create it and then push it down
analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to
consist of essentially passive recipients.
The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this
world. He did, of course, have some freedom of action. He could
choose to switch off the TV; but if he decided to leave it on,
then essentially his freedom of action was confined to choosing
from a menu of options decided for him by others, and to
‘consuming’ their content at times decided by them. He was, in
other words, a human surrogate for one of BF Skinner’s pigeons –
free to peck at whatever coloured lever took his fancy, but not
free at all in comparison with his fellow-pigeon perched outside
on the roof.
11 ibid.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
12
The other essential feature of the world of push media was its
fundamental asymmetry. All the creative energy was assumed to be
located at one end (the producer/broadcaster). The viewer or
listener was assumed to be incapable of, or uninterested in,
creating content; and even if it turned out that he was capable
of creative activity, there was no way in which anything he
produced could have been published.
Looking back, the most astonishing thing about the broadcastdominated
world was how successful it was for so long in keeping
billions of people in thrall. Networks could pull in audiences
in the tens of millions for successful and popular broadcasts –
and pitch their advertising rates accordingly. Small wonder that
one owner of a UK ITV franchise (I think it was Roy Thompson)
described commercial television (in public) as “a licence to
print money”.
But in fact the dominance of the push model was an artefact of
the state of technology. Analogue transmission technology
severely limited the number of channels that could be broadcast
through the ether, so consumer choice was restricted by the laws
of analogue electronics. The advent of (analogue) cable and
satellite transmission and, later, digital technology changed all
that and began to hollow-out the push model from within.
The Internet – and particularly the Web – is exactly the
opposite of this. The Web is a pull medium. Nothing comes to
you unless you choose it and click on it to ‘pull’ it down onto
your computer. You’re in charge. In the words of Rupert
Murdoch’s daughter, Elizabeth, the Web is a “sit up” medium, in
contrast to TV, which is a “sit back” medium.
So the first implication of the switch from push to pull is a
radical increase in consumer sovereignty. We saw this early on
in e-commerce, because it became easy to compare online prices
and locate the most competitive suppliers from the comfort of
your own armchair. Just one illustration: over 80 per cent of
prospective customers nowadays turn up at Ford dealerships in the
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
13
US armed not only with information about particular models, but
also with detailed data on the prices that dealers elsewhere in
the country are charging for those models.12
We’re now seeing this in other areas too – for example in the
way prospective students click their way through the websites of
competing universities while deciding which ones to apply to.
But the Internet doesn’t just enable people to become more
fickle and choosy consumers. It also makes them much better
informed – or at least provides them with formidable resources
with which to become more knowledgeable. Search technology is
the key to this. In an interesting recent book, The Search, John
Battelle describes the dramatic effects that search engines like
Google are having on the advertising and marketing industries.
“In the past few years”, he writes, “search has become a
universally understood method of navigating our
information universe: much as the Windows interface
defined our interactions with the personal computer,
search defines our interactions with the Internet. Put a
search box in front of just about anybody, and he’ll know
what to do with it. And the aggregate of all those
searches, it turns out, is knowable: it constitutes the
database of our intentions”. 13
The Internet and related communications technologies are
making people more connected. The average person today interacts
with far more people than her father did. As the Economist puts
it in a recent article:
“A famous 1967 study by Stanley Milgram (which
later became the basis for a film) suggested that
there were at most “six degrees of separation”
between any two people in America, meaning that the
12 “Crowned at last”, Economist, 31 March, 2005.
13 John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of
Business and Transformed Our Culture, Portfolio, 2005, page 4.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
14
chain of acquaintances between them never had more
than six links. According to more recent work along
similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6,
despite the growth in America's population since
Milgram's study. Being able to keep in touch with a
much wider range of people through technologies
such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.”14
The Internet is also making it much harder for companies to
keep secrets. If one of your products has flaws, or if a service
you provide is sub-standard, then the chances are that the news
will appear somewhere on a Blog or a posting to a newsgroup or
email list. There was a celebrated case of this some time ago
with Kryptonite bike locks which – it turned out – could be
opened by anyone equipped with a Bic biro. The company knew of
the flaw, but did nothing until news of it was published on a
cycling website. And then all hell broke loose.15
And in the last few months, the giant Sony corporation has
been crucified because of the discovery – first published on a
Blog – that copy-protection software on Sony music disks was
covertly installing software on customers’ PCs which could
compromise their security. It’s not clear exactly when Sony had
become aware of the problem but when the story finally broke --
on a techie’s Blog -- the company’s various inept attempts at
denial and damage-limitation were relentlessly exposed and
discredited by enraged consumers hunting in virtual packs.16
My conjecture therefore is that nobody who offers a public
service will be immune from this aspect of a ubiquitous Net. And
with every day that passes we see other examples. Take for
instance the maddening hypocrisy of companies whose call centres
14 “The New Organisation”, Economist, 21 January, 2006.
15 “Lock, stock and caught over a barrel”, Observer, 26 September, 2004. Online
at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1312736,00.html
16 See “How Sony became an Ugly Sister”, Observer, 18 December, 2005. Online at
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1669722,00.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
15
give you a recorded message saying that they really value your
call and then drag you through a Kafkaesque maze for 20 minutes
before you get even a chance to talk to a human being. There’s
now a useful website17 on which users post the key codes needed to
bypass the maze. For Citibank in the US, for example, the
sequence you need is 0#0#0#0#0#0#! And the name of this site?
Why www.gethuman.com
Some years ago, I gave a presentation at a seminar in
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on the future of information
technology and how it might affect the health service.
The thing I remember most from the event is a statement made
by a quietly-spoken medical researcher from the National
Institute of Health. The biggest challenge General Practitioners
will face in 2010, he said, was “how to deal with the Internetinformed
patient”.
And I don’t think he was joking.
The emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus
one of the implications of an Internet-centric world. The days
when companies could assume that the only really demanding
customers they were likely to encounter were those who subscribed
to Which? are over.
Another implication is that the asymmetry of the old, pushmedia
world may be replaced by something much more balanced.
Remember that the underlying assumption of the old broadcast
model was that audiences are passive and uncreative.
What we’re now discovering is that that passivity and apparent
lack of creativity may have been more due to the absence of tools
and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human
nature. Certainly, that’s the only explanation I can think of
for what’s been happening on the Net in the last few years.
17 http://www.gethuman.com/us/
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
16
Take Blogging – the practice of keeping an online diary.
There are millions and millions of the things – when I last
checked the other night Technorati, a Blog-tracking service, was
claiming to be monitoring over 28.9 million, and the number of
them is doubling every five and a half months. The current
creation rate is 75,000 a day – that’s about one a second.18 Many
of them are, as you might expect, mere dross – vanity publishing
with no discernible literary or intellectual merit. But
something like 13 million Blogs were still being updated three
months after their initial creation, and many of them contain
writing and thinking of a very high order. In my own areas of
professional interest, for example, Blogs are always my most
trusted online sources, because I know many of the people who
write them, and some of them are world experts in their fields.19
What is significant about the Blogging phenomenon is its
demonstration that the traffic in ideas and cultural products
isn’t a one-way street – as it was in the old push-media ecology.
People have always been thoughtful and articulate and wellinformed,
but up to now relatively few of them ever made it past
the gatekeepers who controlled access to publication media.
Blogging software and the Internet gave them the platform they
needed – and boy have they grasped the opportunity!
The other remarkable explosion of creativity comes from
digital photography. In the last few years an enormous number of
digital cameras have been sold – and of course many mobile phones
now come with an onboard camera. The trend is so pronounced that
even the biggest names in photography are getting out of film.
Kodak decided to stop making film cameras some time ago.
Recently, Nikon announced that it was planning the same thing.
18 Dave Sifri, “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006”, online at
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/02/81.html
19 For example, Professor Ed Felten of Princeton, a leading expert on digital
rights management, encryption and related issues whose Blog
(http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) is a must-read for anyone interested in
these arcane but important matters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
17
And Konica Minolta has now announced that it too is going
completely digital.
So every day, millions of digital photographs are taken.
Until the advent of a site called Flickr.com, an understandable
response to this statement would have been “so what?” But Flickr
allows people to upload their pictures and display them on the
Web, each neatly resized and allocated its own unique URL. And
it has grown like crazy – to the point where it was acquired by
Yahoo20 in March 2005 for an undisclosed pile of serious money.
I don’t know how many photographs Flickr holds, but it already
run into many millions.21 For me, the most interesting aspect of
it is that users are encouraged to attach tags to their pictures,
and these tags can be used as the basis for searches of the
entire database. The other day I searched for photographs tagged
with ‘Ireland’ and came up with 122,000 images! (A month
earlier, the same search had come up with 85,000.) Of course I
didn’t sift through them all, but I must have looked at a few
hundred. They were mostly holiday and casual snapshots, but here
and there were some truly beautiful images. What struck me most,
though, was what they represented. Ten years ago, those
snapshots would have wound up in a shoebox and would certainly
never have been seen in a public forum. But now they can be –
and are being – published, shared with others, made available to
the world. And this is something new. And something important
for those of us who aspire to reach audiences with our messages.
~oOo~
What I’m really trying to say is that the world has changed
out of all recognition already. And if I’m right about the
20 “A Flickr of the digital camera switch and the folksonomy system is born”,
Observer, 27 November, 2005. Online at:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1651448,00.html
21 In December 2004, Salon.com was reporting 2.2 million and growing at a rate
of 30,000 per day. See http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/12/20/flickr/.
These estimates are now seriously out of date.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
18
analogy with printing, this is just the beginning. We ain’t seen
nothin’ yet.
Now it would be impertinent of me to try to spell out what all
this might mean for you. You know your own business best. But
here’s a salutary tale and a closing thought.
The thought is that no industry can afford to ignore what’s
going on, even if it thinks that the Internet is nothing to do
with it.
If you want a case study of this, consider what happened to
the music industry.
In the early 1980s, recorded music went digital with the
arrival of the compact disk. Recording studios pumped out music
as streams of ones and zeroes; and at the consumer end, CD
players translated those ones and zeroes back into sounds. The
problem was: how to get those ones and zeroes – those digital
bitstreams – from studio to player. The solution was to burn the
bits onto plastic disks and distribute those to consumers. That
meant making the disks, burning the music onto them, printing
labels, packing them into boxes (which always seemed to break),
packing the boxes into bigger boxes, putting those on pallets,
loading the pallets onto trucks, delivering them to warehouses,
who then delivered them to retailers, who took the disks out of
the boxes and put the boxes on display and… I could go on, but
you will see what a wasteful, inefficient, brain-dead way that
was for distributing a product.
Nevertheless, the record industry built a very cosy business
out of this. There was one small problem: the economics of
producing and shipping disks meant that there was little
commercial mileage in selling single tracks, so the industry
focussed on selling albums and increasingly ignored the consumer
demand for tracks. And it might have continued doing this
forever, but for one thing: the Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
19
In 1999 a disaffected music lover called Shawn Fanning sat
down and wrote some software which enabled people easily to
locate and share music tracks over the Net. He called it
Napster. Within 18 months, Napster had 80 million subscribers,
swapping millions of tracks every hour of every day. The music
industry eventually got Napster shut down, but by then the genie
was out of the bottle. And even today, as I speak, millions of
music tracks are being illicitly shared across the Net (remember
that CacheLogic survey of Internet traffic), and the only hope
for the music industry is to fall in with the legal downloading
services offered by companies like Apple with its iTunes Store.
Since it opened the store, Apple has sold a million tracks a day,
and last week celebrated the sale of its billionth song.
One of the defensive arguments used by the record companies to
justify their existence – not to mention their stock options --
was that only they could find and nurture talent. Without them,
so they implied, the Rolling Stones and U2 would still be playing
in pubs, clubs and student raves. Well, I don’t know if you’ve
heard of a Sheffield band called the Arctic Monkeys, but I’m
willing to bet your kids have. They’ve suddenly become the
biggest band in Britain. And they did it by releasing their
music – free – on their website, and letting fans spread it by
word of mouth. Eventually a record label came begging to be
allowed to take them on. It is bands like Arctic Monkeys, not
record companies, that are the future of the music business.
Nobody is indispensable any more.
The moral of the story is that you ignore changes in the
communications ecology at your peril. Remember what Andy Grove
said all those years ago. Companies that are not Internet
companies won’t be companies at all.
Thanks to http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/nic/keynote-hindu.pdf
world1
John Naughton2
There’s a lovely Latin phrase – terra firma. It means “solid
earth”. It’s the basis for a metaphor we use a lot. We talk
approvingly about someone who has “his feet on the ground”, and
disparagingly about people who are “not properly earthed”. For
us, the earth, the ground, is something dependable, something
fixed, something immutable.
And yet for years I lived in Cambridge three doors away from a
man named Dan McKenzie who believed otherwise. Dan was a
geophysicist who thought that, far from being fixed and
immutable, the ground on which we stood was shifting. He was the
leading scientist in a small group who formulated, in 1967, the
theory of plate tectonics – the view that the earth’s surface is
comprised of a number of giant plates which are constantly in
motion, colliding with or sliding along one another.3 When they
push against one another, huge mountain ranges are created.
That’s how we got the Himalayas. And when plates scrape against
one another, as for example along the San Andreas fault in
California, we get earthquakes or tsunamis.
As it happened, Dan was right. His view of how the earth
behaves is now accepted as the truth. So while our terra may be
appear to be firma, actually it’s moving, with consequences which
1 Copyright information: this is an edited version of the Annual Lecture of the
UK Marketing Society, delivered on 28 February, 2006 at the Science Museum,
London. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, which means that it can be freely
reproduced in unchanged form for non-commercial use provided the authorship is
acknowledged. See http://creativecommons.org for details.
2 Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, the Open University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA. Email: j.j.naughton@open.ac.uk.
3 http://www.agu.org/inside/awards/bios/mckenzie_dan.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
2
are sometimes terrible – as we saw in the Asian tsunami of Boxing
Day, 2004.
There’s a simple and obvious moral here and it is this: even
when you think things are immutable, you may be wrong. Huge
changes may be taking place under our feet, but only our
grandchildren will see them clearly. Which is no consolation to
us, because we will be dead and gone by that time.
What I want to do this evening is to apply this philosophy to
thinking about our communications environment. My conjecture is
that huge, tectonic shifts are under way in this environment;
that these changes have momentous implications for our society
and its industries; and that we currently lack the tools or the
inclination to think coherently about the phenomenon.
What do I mean by “momentous implications”? Well, to
illustrate it I want you to join me in a little thought
experiment.
I want you to close your eyes and think back to 1993.
The year is 1993. John Major is Prime Minister. The Tories
are in government. Tony Blair still looks like Bambi. Bill
Clinton has just become President of the United States. Nobody’s
heard of Monica Lewinsky. Germany is still a prosperous country.
Mercedes are still the most reliable cars around. Only grown-ups
have mobile phones. Nobody – but nobody – outside of academic and
research labs has an email address. And a URL – now that is
something really exotic! Amazon is a river in South America. A
googol is the technical term for an enormous number – 1 followed
by one hundred zeroes. eBay and iPod are typos. An instant
message is something you send via a chap on a motorbike. RyanAir
is a small Irish airline which flies to airports nobody has ever
heard of. Oh, and there are quaint little shops on the High
Street called “travel agents”.
Now, open your eyes and spool forward to the present. Hands
up who doesn’t have an email address. Hands up who doesn’t use
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
3
Google. Hands up anyone whose company doesn’t have a web site.
When was the last time you saw a white van on the motorway that
didn’t have www.something.com on the back? Who hasn’t bought
books or records from Amazon? Who hasn’t thought of bidding for
something on eBay? Anyone who hasn’t booked a flight on the Web?
How many people here haven’t ordered groceries via Tesco online?
I could go on but you will get the point. 2006 is only
thirteen years on from 1993. Why did I pick that year? Because
1993 was the year that the World Wide Web took off. It had
actually been invented three years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee,
but the spring of 2003 was when the first graphical browser was
launched and the Web became something that ordinary human beings
could understand and use.4
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, nobody knows how
big the Web is. When it stopped publishing the number, Google
was claiming to index 8 billion pages, but everyone knows that
was just the tip of the iceberg. Some sensible people are
claiming that the web is 400 times bigger than the number of
pages indexed by Google. 400 times 8 is 3,200. So a publication
medium which contains over 3,000 billion pages has come into
being in little over a decade, and it’s growing by maybe 25,000
pages an hour. This is a revolutionary transformation of our
environment by any standards.
What does this mean?
The honest answer is that we haven’t a clue, and to see why I
want you to join me in another little thought experiment.
Think back to the year 1455. Why 1455? Well that was the year
when a peculiar guy living in Mainz in Germany, name of
Gutenberg, published the bible he had created using a fancy
invention called moveable type. It was the world’s first printed
book.
4 see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet,
London, 1999, Phoenix.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
4
Printing was a revolutionary transformation of mankind’s
communications environment. Up to then, books were strictly a
minority sport – the preserve of a tiny, rich and powerful elite,
centred on the Church and the aristocracy. But in time, printing
created the modern world. It undermined the authority of the
Catholic church, enabled the Reformation and the Enlightenment,
powered the rise of nationalism and of modern science, created
new social classes and stimulated the creation of the educational
system we still rely on today.
It even changed our conception of ‘childhood’ as a protected
phase in people’s lives. Before print, the definition of
adulthood was when a child reached the point where it was
competent to participate in an oral culture. In the Middle Ages,
that age was seven – which is why the Catholic Church defined
seven as the ‘age of reason’, the age at which a person could be
deemed responsible for their behaviour. (That’s why you never
see children in a Breughel painting – you just see small adults.)
But in a print-based culture, it took longer to get kids to the
point where they could competently participate in the business of
life. So ‘childhood’ was extended effectively until the age of
14 – which as you know was the original school-leaving age.5
Now all of this flowed from Gutenberg’s invention in 1455.
But neither he nor his contemporaries could have had any idea
what it would lead to. And if you imagine a MORI pollster going
around Mainz in 1468 with a clipboard and asking citizens for
their opinion of what the long term impact of the technology
would be, well you can see how absurd the idea is.
All of which leads me to formulate Naughton’s First Law. It
says that we invariably over-estimate the short-term implications
of new communications technologies, and we greviously underestimate
their long term impacts.
5 See Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Vintage, 1994.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
5
The great Internet Bubble of 1995 – 2000 was based on crazy
over-estimates of short-term impacts leading to what one
economist memorably christened “irrational exuberance”6. But
we’ve been though all that, and emerged sadder, poorer and I hope
wiser. Now is the time to turn to longer-term implications.
So in what follows I’m going to think aloud about what these
might be. And the reason I’ve gone on at some length about
printing is to provide a health warning. I don’t know what the
future holds any more than the next academic. But what I can do
is suggest some ways of thinking about it.
~oOo~
The conventional way of thinking about this stuff is what the
computer scientist John Seely Brown7 calls “endism” – the
perspective that sees new technologies as replacing or even
wiping out older ones. Thus at the moment we see a great deal of
angst in the newspaper business about whether online news sites
will wipe out newspapers. Well, maybe they will, but that has
more to do with classified advertising than with news. The truth
is that the interactions between old and new communications
technologies are actually very complex.
For example, when the CD-ROM arrived, people predicted the
demise of the printed book. It didn’t happen. In fact, books
are doing quite nicely. When TV arrived, people predicted the
end of radio and indeed of movies. It didn’t happen. Radio and
movies are doing quite nicely, thank you. TV news was going to
wipe out newspapers. It didn’t happen. And so on.
But at the same time something happened. Although the CD-ROM
didn’t wipe out the printed book it did change forever the
prospects for expensive reference works. Remember Encyclopedia
6 Robert J Schiller: Irrational Exuberance, Princeton University Press, 2000.
7 John Seely Brown and Andrew Duguid: The Social Life of Information, Harvard
Business School Press, 2000. See
http://www.sociallifeofinformation.com/toc.htm for contents and downloadable
chapters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
6
Brittannica? And as for videotapes and DVD, well the movie
studios now make more revenue from them than they do from
cinemas. And so on.
So where do we find an intellectual framework which captures
the complexity of these interactions? The answer was suggested
many years ago by the late Neil Postman, a Professor at New York
University who was the most perceptive critic of media and
communications technology since Marshall McLuhan. In a series of
witty and thought-provoking books – with titles like Teaching as
a Subversive Activity, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The
Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly -- Postman described
how our societies are shaped by their prevailing modes of
communication, and fretted about the consequences.
In seeking a language in which to talk about change, I’ve
borrowed an idea from Postman – the notion of media ecology, that
is to say, the study of media as environments. The term is
borrowed from the sciences, where an ecosystem is defined as a
dynamic system in which living organisms interact with one
another and with their environment.8 These interactions can be
very complex and take many forms. Organisms prey on one another;
compete for food and other nutrients; have parasitic or symbiotic
relationships; wax and wane; prosper and decline. And an
ecosystem is never static. The system may be in equilibrium at
any given moment, but the balance is precarious. The slightest
perturbation may disturb it, resulting in a new set of
interactions and movement to another – temporary – point of
equilibrium.
This seems to me to be a more insightful way of viewing our
communications environment than the conventional ‘market’
metaphor commonly used in public discussion, because it comes
closer to capturing the complexity of what actually goes on in
real life.
8 W.B. Clapham: Natural Ecosystems, New York, Macmillan, 1973.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
7
A good illustration of ecological adaptation comes from the
interaction between television and newspapers in the UK. There
came a point – sometime in the late 1950s – when more people in
Britain got their news from TV than from newspapers. This
created a crisis for the papers. How should they respond to the
threat? Well, basically they reacted in two different ways. The
popular papers – the ones with mass circulations and readers
lower down the social scale -- essentially became parasitic
feeders on television and the cult of celebrity that it spawned.
(They’re now also parasitic feeders on Premiership football.)
The broadsheets, for their part, decided that if they could no
longer be the first with the news, then they would instead become
providers of comment, analysis and, later, of features. In other
words, television news did not wipe out British newspapers. But
it forced them to adapt and move to a different place in the
ecosystem.
The ‘organisms’ in our media ecosystem include broadcast and
narrowcast television, movies, radio, print and the Internet
(which itself encompasses the Web, email and peer-to-peer
networking of various kinds). For most of our lives, the
dominant organism in this system – the one that grabbed most of
the resources, revenue and attention – was broadcast TV. Note
that ‘broadcast’ implies few-to-many: a relatively small number
of broadcasters, transmitting content to billions of essentially
passive viewers and listeners.
This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us
grew up. But it’s in the process of radical change.
How come? Answer: because broadcast TV is in inexorable
decline. Its audience is fragmenting. Twenty years ago, a show
like The Two Ronnies could attract audiences of up to 20 million
in the UK. Now an audience of five million is considered a
stupendous success by any television channel. In five years’
time, 200,000 viewers will be considered a miracle.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
8
Broadcast TV is being eaten from within: the worm in the bud
in this case is narrowcast digital television -- in which
specialist content is aimed at specialised, subscription-based
audiences and distributed via digital channels. But waiting in
the wings is something even more devastating – Internet Protocol
TV (IPtv) – which is technospeak for television on demand,
delivered to consumers via the Internet. And it’s coming fairly
soon to a computer monitor near you.
The trouble for broadcast TV is that its business model is
based on its ability to attract and hold mass audiences. Once
audiences become fragmented, the commercial logic erodes.
And that’s not all. New technologies like Personal Video
Recorders (PVRs) – essentially recorders which use hard drives
rather than tape and are much easier to program – are enabling
viewers to determine their own viewing schedules and – more
significantly – to avoid advertisements. Think of Sky Plus.
Think of TiVO. As the CEO of Yahoo said recently at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the era of “appointment-to-view”
TV is coming to an end.
Note that when I say that broadcast TV is declining, I am NOT
saying that it will disappear. That’s what John Seely Brown
calls “endism’ and it’s not the way ecologists think. Broadcast
will continue to exist, for the simple and very good reason that
some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology.
Only a broadcast model can deal with something like a World Cup
final or a major terrorist attack, for example – when the
attention of the world is focussed on a single event or a single
place. But broadcast will lose its dominant position in the
ecosystem, and that is the change that I think will have really
profound consequences for us all.
~oOo~
What will replace broadcast TV as the new dominant organism in
our media ecosystem? Simple: the ubiquitous Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
9
Note that I do not say the Web. The biggest mistake people in
the media business make is to think that the Net and the Web are
synonymous.
They’re not. Of course the Web – as I intimated earlier -- is
enormous, but it’s just one kind of traffic that runs on the
Internet’s tracks and signalling. And already the Web is being
dwarfed by other kinds of traffic. According to data gathered by
the Cambridge firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer networking traffic
now exceeds Web traffic by a factor of between two and ten,
depending on the time of day. And I’ve no doubt that in ten
years’ time, P2P traffic will be outrun by some other ingenious
networking application, as yet undiscovered.
Already the signs of the Net’s approaching centrality are
everywhere. We see it, for example,
• in the astonishing penetration of broadband access in
developed countries,
• in the explosive growth of e-commerce,
• in the streaming of audio – and, increasingly, video
across the Net,
• in the sudden interest of Rupert Murdoch and other
broadcasters in acquiring broadband companies,
• in declining newspaper sales and the growth of online
news
• and in the stupendous growth of internet telephony –
spurred by the realisation that, sooner rather than
later, all voice telephony will be done over the Net.9
9 “It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional
telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry
are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony
will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive
to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in
short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape.” Economist, 15
September, 2005.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
10
Oh and I almost forgot to mention the looming implications
of Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) technology, together with Wi-
Fi and mesh networking.
And then there’s the fact that you can now buy episodes of
popular US TV series on the Apple iTunes store, download them
onto your computer – and watch them on your sparkling new Video
iPod.
Oh and there’s BBC Radio’s “listen again” facility, whereby if
you miss a programme (the Archers, say) you can always click on a
link and have it streamed to your computer at a time that suits
you.
And I haven’t mentioned, have I, that you can do the same for
24 hours with BBC2’s Newsnight programme?
And of course there’s Google, a phenomenon that deserves an
entire lecture to itself.
~oOo~
What does this mean?
Well, first of all, these developments illustrate the extent
to which the Internet is becoming central to our lives.
In 1999, Andy Grove, who was then the CEO of Intel, made a
famous prediction. In five years’ time, he said, all companies
will be Internet companies or they won’t be companies at all.10
At the time, people laughed. Did he mean that every hamburger
joint and hardware store would have to be online by 2004? What a
ridiculous idea!
In fact it was an exceedingly insightful prediction. What
Grove meant was that the Internet would move from being something
rather exotic to being a kind of utility like electricity or the
telephone. None of us today could envisage being in business
without making use of both. As the Economist, put it,
10 Economist, 24 June, 1999
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
11
“The Internet is helping companies to lower costs
dramatically across their supply and demand chains, take
their customer service into a different league, enter new
markets, create additional revenue streams and redefine
their business relationships. What Mr Grove was really
saying was that if in five years’ time a company is not
using the Internet to do some or all of these things, it
will be destroyed by competitors who are.”11
The point of all this is that while we grew up and came to
maturity in a media ecosystem dominated by broadcast TV, our
children and grandchildren will live in an environment dominated
by the Net. And the interesting question – the point, in a way,
of this lecture – is what will that mean for us, and for them?
~oOo~
In thinking about the future, the two most useful words are
‘push’ and ‘pull’ because they capture the essence of where we’ve
been and where we’re headed.
Broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium. By that I mean that a
relatively select band of producers (broadcasters) decide what
content is to be created, create it and then push it down
analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to
consist of essentially passive recipients.
The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this
world. He did, of course, have some freedom of action. He could
choose to switch off the TV; but if he decided to leave it on,
then essentially his freedom of action was confined to choosing
from a menu of options decided for him by others, and to
‘consuming’ their content at times decided by them. He was, in
other words, a human surrogate for one of BF Skinner’s pigeons –
free to peck at whatever coloured lever took his fancy, but not
free at all in comparison with his fellow-pigeon perched outside
on the roof.
11 ibid.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
12
The other essential feature of the world of push media was its
fundamental asymmetry. All the creative energy was assumed to be
located at one end (the producer/broadcaster). The viewer or
listener was assumed to be incapable of, or uninterested in,
creating content; and even if it turned out that he was capable
of creative activity, there was no way in which anything he
produced could have been published.
Looking back, the most astonishing thing about the broadcastdominated
world was how successful it was for so long in keeping
billions of people in thrall. Networks could pull in audiences
in the tens of millions for successful and popular broadcasts –
and pitch their advertising rates accordingly. Small wonder that
one owner of a UK ITV franchise (I think it was Roy Thompson)
described commercial television (in public) as “a licence to
print money”.
But in fact the dominance of the push model was an artefact of
the state of technology. Analogue transmission technology
severely limited the number of channels that could be broadcast
through the ether, so consumer choice was restricted by the laws
of analogue electronics. The advent of (analogue) cable and
satellite transmission and, later, digital technology changed all
that and began to hollow-out the push model from within.
The Internet – and particularly the Web – is exactly the
opposite of this. The Web is a pull medium. Nothing comes to
you unless you choose it and click on it to ‘pull’ it down onto
your computer. You’re in charge. In the words of Rupert
Murdoch’s daughter, Elizabeth, the Web is a “sit up” medium, in
contrast to TV, which is a “sit back” medium.
So the first implication of the switch from push to pull is a
radical increase in consumer sovereignty. We saw this early on
in e-commerce, because it became easy to compare online prices
and locate the most competitive suppliers from the comfort of
your own armchair. Just one illustration: over 80 per cent of
prospective customers nowadays turn up at Ford dealerships in the
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
13
US armed not only with information about particular models, but
also with detailed data on the prices that dealers elsewhere in
the country are charging for those models.12
We’re now seeing this in other areas too – for example in the
way prospective students click their way through the websites of
competing universities while deciding which ones to apply to.
But the Internet doesn’t just enable people to become more
fickle and choosy consumers. It also makes them much better
informed – or at least provides them with formidable resources
with which to become more knowledgeable. Search technology is
the key to this. In an interesting recent book, The Search, John
Battelle describes the dramatic effects that search engines like
Google are having on the advertising and marketing industries.
“In the past few years”, he writes, “search has become a
universally understood method of navigating our
information universe: much as the Windows interface
defined our interactions with the personal computer,
search defines our interactions with the Internet. Put a
search box in front of just about anybody, and he’ll know
what to do with it. And the aggregate of all those
searches, it turns out, is knowable: it constitutes the
database of our intentions”. 13
The Internet and related communications technologies are
making people more connected. The average person today interacts
with far more people than her father did. As the Economist puts
it in a recent article:
“A famous 1967 study by Stanley Milgram (which
later became the basis for a film) suggested that
there were at most “six degrees of separation”
between any two people in America, meaning that the
12 “Crowned at last”, Economist, 31 March, 2005.
13 John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of
Business and Transformed Our Culture, Portfolio, 2005, page 4.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
14
chain of acquaintances between them never had more
than six links. According to more recent work along
similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6,
despite the growth in America's population since
Milgram's study. Being able to keep in touch with a
much wider range of people through technologies
such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.”14
The Internet is also making it much harder for companies to
keep secrets. If one of your products has flaws, or if a service
you provide is sub-standard, then the chances are that the news
will appear somewhere on a Blog or a posting to a newsgroup or
email list. There was a celebrated case of this some time ago
with Kryptonite bike locks which – it turned out – could be
opened by anyone equipped with a Bic biro. The company knew of
the flaw, but did nothing until news of it was published on a
cycling website. And then all hell broke loose.15
And in the last few months, the giant Sony corporation has
been crucified because of the discovery – first published on a
Blog – that copy-protection software on Sony music disks was
covertly installing software on customers’ PCs which could
compromise their security. It’s not clear exactly when Sony had
become aware of the problem but when the story finally broke --
on a techie’s Blog -- the company’s various inept attempts at
denial and damage-limitation were relentlessly exposed and
discredited by enraged consumers hunting in virtual packs.16
My conjecture therefore is that nobody who offers a public
service will be immune from this aspect of a ubiquitous Net. And
with every day that passes we see other examples. Take for
instance the maddening hypocrisy of companies whose call centres
14 “The New Organisation”, Economist, 21 January, 2006.
15 “Lock, stock and caught over a barrel”, Observer, 26 September, 2004. Online
at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1312736,00.html
16 See “How Sony became an Ugly Sister”, Observer, 18 December, 2005. Online at
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1669722,00.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
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give you a recorded message saying that they really value your
call and then drag you through a Kafkaesque maze for 20 minutes
before you get even a chance to talk to a human being. There’s
now a useful website17 on which users post the key codes needed to
bypass the maze. For Citibank in the US, for example, the
sequence you need is 0#0#0#0#0#0#! And the name of this site?
Why www.gethuman.com
Some years ago, I gave a presentation at a seminar in
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on the future of information
technology and how it might affect the health service.
The thing I remember most from the event is a statement made
by a quietly-spoken medical researcher from the National
Institute of Health. The biggest challenge General Practitioners
will face in 2010, he said, was “how to deal with the Internetinformed
patient”.
And I don’t think he was joking.
The emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus
one of the implications of an Internet-centric world. The days
when companies could assume that the only really demanding
customers they were likely to encounter were those who subscribed
to Which? are over.
Another implication is that the asymmetry of the old, pushmedia
world may be replaced by something much more balanced.
Remember that the underlying assumption of the old broadcast
model was that audiences are passive and uncreative.
What we’re now discovering is that that passivity and apparent
lack of creativity may have been more due to the absence of tools
and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human
nature. Certainly, that’s the only explanation I can think of
for what’s been happening on the Net in the last few years.
17 http://www.gethuman.com/us/
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
16
Take Blogging – the practice of keeping an online diary.
There are millions and millions of the things – when I last
checked the other night Technorati, a Blog-tracking service, was
claiming to be monitoring over 28.9 million, and the number of
them is doubling every five and a half months. The current
creation rate is 75,000 a day – that’s about one a second.18 Many
of them are, as you might expect, mere dross – vanity publishing
with no discernible literary or intellectual merit. But
something like 13 million Blogs were still being updated three
months after their initial creation, and many of them contain
writing and thinking of a very high order. In my own areas of
professional interest, for example, Blogs are always my most
trusted online sources, because I know many of the people who
write them, and some of them are world experts in their fields.19
What is significant about the Blogging phenomenon is its
demonstration that the traffic in ideas and cultural products
isn’t a one-way street – as it was in the old push-media ecology.
People have always been thoughtful and articulate and wellinformed,
but up to now relatively few of them ever made it past
the gatekeepers who controlled access to publication media.
Blogging software and the Internet gave them the platform they
needed – and boy have they grasped the opportunity!
The other remarkable explosion of creativity comes from
digital photography. In the last few years an enormous number of
digital cameras have been sold – and of course many mobile phones
now come with an onboard camera. The trend is so pronounced that
even the biggest names in photography are getting out of film.
Kodak decided to stop making film cameras some time ago.
Recently, Nikon announced that it was planning the same thing.
18 Dave Sifri, “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006”, online at
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/02/81.html
19 For example, Professor Ed Felten of Princeton, a leading expert on digital
rights management, encryption and related issues whose Blog
(http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) is a must-read for anyone interested in
these arcane but important matters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
17
And Konica Minolta has now announced that it too is going
completely digital.
So every day, millions of digital photographs are taken.
Until the advent of a site called Flickr.com, an understandable
response to this statement would have been “so what?” But Flickr
allows people to upload their pictures and display them on the
Web, each neatly resized and allocated its own unique URL. And
it has grown like crazy – to the point where it was acquired by
Yahoo20 in March 2005 for an undisclosed pile of serious money.
I don’t know how many photographs Flickr holds, but it already
run into many millions.21 For me, the most interesting aspect of
it is that users are encouraged to attach tags to their pictures,
and these tags can be used as the basis for searches of the
entire database. The other day I searched for photographs tagged
with ‘Ireland’ and came up with 122,000 images! (A month
earlier, the same search had come up with 85,000.) Of course I
didn’t sift through them all, but I must have looked at a few
hundred. They were mostly holiday and casual snapshots, but here
and there were some truly beautiful images. What struck me most,
though, was what they represented. Ten years ago, those
snapshots would have wound up in a shoebox and would certainly
never have been seen in a public forum. But now they can be –
and are being – published, shared with others, made available to
the world. And this is something new. And something important
for those of us who aspire to reach audiences with our messages.
~oOo~
What I’m really trying to say is that the world has changed
out of all recognition already. And if I’m right about the
20 “A Flickr of the digital camera switch and the folksonomy system is born”,
Observer, 27 November, 2005. Online at:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1651448,00.html
21 In December 2004, Salon.com was reporting 2.2 million and growing at a rate
of 30,000 per day. See http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/12/20/flickr/.
These estimates are now seriously out of date.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
18
analogy with printing, this is just the beginning. We ain’t seen
nothin’ yet.
Now it would be impertinent of me to try to spell out what all
this might mean for you. You know your own business best. But
here’s a salutary tale and a closing thought.
The thought is that no industry can afford to ignore what’s
going on, even if it thinks that the Internet is nothing to do
with it.
If you want a case study of this, consider what happened to
the music industry.
In the early 1980s, recorded music went digital with the
arrival of the compact disk. Recording studios pumped out music
as streams of ones and zeroes; and at the consumer end, CD
players translated those ones and zeroes back into sounds. The
problem was: how to get those ones and zeroes – those digital
bitstreams – from studio to player. The solution was to burn the
bits onto plastic disks and distribute those to consumers. That
meant making the disks, burning the music onto them, printing
labels, packing them into boxes (which always seemed to break),
packing the boxes into bigger boxes, putting those on pallets,
loading the pallets onto trucks, delivering them to warehouses,
who then delivered them to retailers, who took the disks out of
the boxes and put the boxes on display and… I could go on, but
you will see what a wasteful, inefficient, brain-dead way that
was for distributing a product.
Nevertheless, the record industry built a very cosy business
out of this. There was one small problem: the economics of
producing and shipping disks meant that there was little
commercial mileage in selling single tracks, so the industry
focussed on selling albums and increasingly ignored the consumer
demand for tracks. And it might have continued doing this
forever, but for one thing: the Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
19
In 1999 a disaffected music lover called Shawn Fanning sat
down and wrote some software which enabled people easily to
locate and share music tracks over the Net. He called it
Napster. Within 18 months, Napster had 80 million subscribers,
swapping millions of tracks every hour of every day. The music
industry eventually got Napster shut down, but by then the genie
was out of the bottle. And even today, as I speak, millions of
music tracks are being illicitly shared across the Net (remember
that CacheLogic survey of Internet traffic), and the only hope
for the music industry is to fall in with the legal downloading
services offered by companies like Apple with its iTunes Store.
Since it opened the store, Apple has sold a million tracks a day,
and last week celebrated the sale of its billionth song.
One of the defensive arguments used by the record companies to
justify their existence – not to mention their stock options --
was that only they could find and nurture talent. Without them,
so they implied, the Rolling Stones and U2 would still be playing
in pubs, clubs and student raves. Well, I don’t know if you’ve
heard of a Sheffield band called the Arctic Monkeys, but I’m
willing to bet your kids have. They’ve suddenly become the
biggest band in Britain. And they did it by releasing their
music – free – on their website, and letting fans spread it by
word of mouth. Eventually a record label came begging to be
allowed to take them on. It is bands like Arctic Monkeys, not
record companies, that are the future of the music business.
Nobody is indispensable any more.
The moral of the story is that you ignore changes in the
communications ecology at your peril. Remember what Andy Grove
said all those years ago. Companies that are not Internet
companies won’t be companies at all.
For information getting:UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
1
Net benefit: how the Internet is transforming our
world1
John Naughton2
There’s a lovely Latin phrase – terra firma. It means “solid
earth”. It’s the basis for a metaphor we use a lot. We talk
approvingly about someone who has “his feet on the ground”, and
disparagingly about people who are “not properly earthed”. For
us, the earth, the ground, is something dependable, something
fixed, something immutable.
And yet for years I lived in Cambridge three doors away from a
man named Dan McKenzie who believed otherwise. Dan was a
geophysicist who thought that, far from being fixed and
immutable, the ground on which we stood was shifting. He was the
leading scientist in a small group who formulated, in 1967, the
theory of plate tectonics – the view that the earth’s surface is
comprised of a number of giant plates which are constantly in
motion, colliding with or sliding along one another.3 When they
push against one another, huge mountain ranges are created.
That’s how we got the Himalayas. And when plates scrape against
one another, as for example along the San Andreas fault in
California, we get earthquakes or tsunamis.
As it happened, Dan was right. His view of how the earth
behaves is now accepted as the truth. So while our terra may be
appear to be firma, actually it’s moving, with consequences which
1 Copyright information: this is an edited version of the Annual Lecture of the
UK Marketing Society, delivered on 28 February, 2006 at the Science Museum,
London. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, which means that it can be freely
reproduced in unchanged form for non-commercial use provided the authorship is
acknowledged. See http://creativecommons.org for details.
2 Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, the Open University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA. Email: j.j.naughton@open.ac.uk.
3 http://www.agu.org/inside/awards/bios/mckenzie_dan.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
2
are sometimes terrible – as we saw in the Asian tsunami of Boxing
Day, 2004.
There’s a simple and obvious moral here and it is this: even
when you think things are immutable, you may be wrong. Huge
changes may be taking place under our feet, but only our
grandchildren will see them clearly. Which is no consolation to
us, because we will be dead and gone by that time.
What I want to do this evening is to apply this philosophy to
thinking about our communications environment. My conjecture is
that huge, tectonic shifts are under way in this environment;
that these changes have momentous implications for our society
and its industries; and that we currently lack the tools or the
inclination to think coherently about the phenomenon.
What do I mean by “momentous implications”? Well, to
illustrate it I want you to join me in a little thought
experiment.
I want you to close your eyes and think back to 1993.
The year is 1993. John Major is Prime Minister. The Tories
are in government. Tony Blair still looks like Bambi. Bill
Clinton has just become President of the United States. Nobody’s
heard of Monica Lewinsky. Germany is still a prosperous country.
Mercedes are still the most reliable cars around. Only grown-ups
have mobile phones. Nobody – but nobody – outside of academic and
research labs has an email address. And a URL – now that is
something really exotic! Amazon is a river in South America. A
googol is the technical term for an enormous number – 1 followed
by one hundred zeroes. eBay and iPod are typos. An instant
message is something you send via a chap on a motorbike. RyanAir
is a small Irish airline which flies to airports nobody has ever
heard of. Oh, and there are quaint little shops on the High
Street called “travel agents”.
Now, open your eyes and spool forward to the present. Hands
up who doesn’t have an email address. Hands up who doesn’t use
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
3
Google. Hands up anyone whose company doesn’t have a web site.
When was the last time you saw a white van on the motorway that
didn’t have www.something.com on the back? Who hasn’t bought
books or records from Amazon? Who hasn’t thought of bidding for
something on eBay? Anyone who hasn’t booked a flight on the Web?
How many people here haven’t ordered groceries via Tesco online?
I could go on but you will get the point. 2006 is only
thirteen years on from 1993. Why did I pick that year? Because
1993 was the year that the World Wide Web took off. It had
actually been invented three years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee,
but the spring of 2003 was when the first graphical browser was
launched and the Web became something that ordinary human beings
could understand and use.4
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, nobody knows how
big the Web is. When it stopped publishing the number, Google
was claiming to index 8 billion pages, but everyone knows that
was just the tip of the iceberg. Some sensible people are
claiming that the web is 400 times bigger than the number of
pages indexed by Google. 400 times 8 is 3,200. So a publication
medium which contains over 3,000 billion pages has come into
being in little over a decade, and it’s growing by maybe 25,000
pages an hour. This is a revolutionary transformation of our
environment by any standards.
What does this mean?
The honest answer is that we haven’t a clue, and to see why I
want you to join me in another little thought experiment.
Think back to the year 1455. Why 1455? Well that was the year
when a peculiar guy living in Mainz in Germany, name of
Gutenberg, published the bible he had created using a fancy
invention called moveable type. It was the world’s first printed
book.
4 see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet,
London, 1999, Phoenix.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
4
Printing was a revolutionary transformation of mankind’s
communications environment. Up to then, books were strictly a
minority sport – the preserve of a tiny, rich and powerful elite,
centred on the Church and the aristocracy. But in time, printing
created the modern world. It undermined the authority of the
Catholic church, enabled the Reformation and the Enlightenment,
powered the rise of nationalism and of modern science, created
new social classes and stimulated the creation of the educational
system we still rely on today.
It even changed our conception of ‘childhood’ as a protected
phase in people’s lives. Before print, the definition of
adulthood was when a child reached the point where it was
competent to participate in an oral culture. In the Middle Ages,
that age was seven – which is why the Catholic Church defined
seven as the ‘age of reason’, the age at which a person could be
deemed responsible for their behaviour. (That’s why you never
see children in a Breughel painting – you just see small adults.)
But in a print-based culture, it took longer to get kids to the
point where they could competently participate in the business of
life. So ‘childhood’ was extended effectively until the age of
14 – which as you know was the original school-leaving age.5
Now all of this flowed from Gutenberg’s invention in 1455.
But neither he nor his contemporaries could have had any idea
what it would lead to. And if you imagine a MORI pollster going
around Mainz in 1468 with a clipboard and asking citizens for
their opinion of what the long term impact of the technology
would be, well you can see how absurd the idea is.
All of which leads me to formulate Naughton’s First Law. It
says that we invariably over-estimate the short-term implications
of new communications technologies, and we greviously underestimate
their long term impacts.
5 See Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Vintage, 1994.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
5
The great Internet Bubble of 1995 – 2000 was based on crazy
over-estimates of short-term impacts leading to what one
economist memorably christened “irrational exuberance”6. But
we’ve been though all that, and emerged sadder, poorer and I hope
wiser. Now is the time to turn to longer-term implications.
So in what follows I’m going to think aloud about what these
might be. And the reason I’ve gone on at some length about
printing is to provide a health warning. I don’t know what the
future holds any more than the next academic. But what I can do
is suggest some ways of thinking about it.
~oOo~
The conventional way of thinking about this stuff is what the
computer scientist John Seely Brown7 calls “endism” – the
perspective that sees new technologies as replacing or even
wiping out older ones. Thus at the moment we see a great deal of
angst in the newspaper business about whether online news sites
will wipe out newspapers. Well, maybe they will, but that has
more to do with classified advertising than with news. The truth
is that the interactions between old and new communications
technologies are actually very complex.
For example, when the CD-ROM arrived, people predicted the
demise of the printed book. It didn’t happen. In fact, books
are doing quite nicely. When TV arrived, people predicted the
end of radio and indeed of movies. It didn’t happen. Radio and
movies are doing quite nicely, thank you. TV news was going to
wipe out newspapers. It didn’t happen. And so on.
But at the same time something happened. Although the CD-ROM
didn’t wipe out the printed book it did change forever the
prospects for expensive reference works. Remember Encyclopedia
6 Robert J Schiller: Irrational Exuberance, Princeton University Press, 2000.
7 John Seely Brown and Andrew Duguid: The Social Life of Information, Harvard
Business School Press, 2000. See
http://www.sociallifeofinformation.com/toc.htm for contents and downloadable
chapters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
6
Brittannica? And as for videotapes and DVD, well the movie
studios now make more revenue from them than they do from
cinemas. And so on.
So where do we find an intellectual framework which captures
the complexity of these interactions? The answer was suggested
many years ago by the late Neil Postman, a Professor at New York
University who was the most perceptive critic of media and
communications technology since Marshall McLuhan. In a series of
witty and thought-provoking books – with titles like Teaching as
a Subversive Activity, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The
Disappearance of Childhood and Technopoly -- Postman described
how our societies are shaped by their prevailing modes of
communication, and fretted about the consequences.
In seeking a language in which to talk about change, I’ve
borrowed an idea from Postman – the notion of media ecology, that
is to say, the study of media as environments. The term is
borrowed from the sciences, where an ecosystem is defined as a
dynamic system in which living organisms interact with one
another and with their environment.8 These interactions can be
very complex and take many forms. Organisms prey on one another;
compete for food and other nutrients; have parasitic or symbiotic
relationships; wax and wane; prosper and decline. And an
ecosystem is never static. The system may be in equilibrium at
any given moment, but the balance is precarious. The slightest
perturbation may disturb it, resulting in a new set of
interactions and movement to another – temporary – point of
equilibrium.
This seems to me to be a more insightful way of viewing our
communications environment than the conventional ‘market’
metaphor commonly used in public discussion, because it comes
closer to capturing the complexity of what actually goes on in
real life.
8 W.B. Clapham: Natural Ecosystems, New York, Macmillan, 1973.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
7
A good illustration of ecological adaptation comes from the
interaction between television and newspapers in the UK. There
came a point – sometime in the late 1950s – when more people in
Britain got their news from TV than from newspapers. This
created a crisis for the papers. How should they respond to the
threat? Well, basically they reacted in two different ways. The
popular papers – the ones with mass circulations and readers
lower down the social scale -- essentially became parasitic
feeders on television and the cult of celebrity that it spawned.
(They’re now also parasitic feeders on Premiership football.)
The broadsheets, for their part, decided that if they could no
longer be the first with the news, then they would instead become
providers of comment, analysis and, later, of features. In other
words, television news did not wipe out British newspapers. But
it forced them to adapt and move to a different place in the
ecosystem.
The ‘organisms’ in our media ecosystem include broadcast and
narrowcast television, movies, radio, print and the Internet
(which itself encompasses the Web, email and peer-to-peer
networking of various kinds). For most of our lives, the
dominant organism in this system – the one that grabbed most of
the resources, revenue and attention – was broadcast TV. Note
that ‘broadcast’ implies few-to-many: a relatively small number
of broadcasters, transmitting content to billions of essentially
passive viewers and listeners.
This ecosystem is the media environment in which most of us
grew up. But it’s in the process of radical change.
How come? Answer: because broadcast TV is in inexorable
decline. Its audience is fragmenting. Twenty years ago, a show
like The Two Ronnies could attract audiences of up to 20 million
in the UK. Now an audience of five million is considered a
stupendous success by any television channel. In five years’
time, 200,000 viewers will be considered a miracle.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
8
Broadcast TV is being eaten from within: the worm in the bud
in this case is narrowcast digital television -- in which
specialist content is aimed at specialised, subscription-based
audiences and distributed via digital channels. But waiting in
the wings is something even more devastating – Internet Protocol
TV (IPtv) – which is technospeak for television on demand,
delivered to consumers via the Internet. And it’s coming fairly
soon to a computer monitor near you.
The trouble for broadcast TV is that its business model is
based on its ability to attract and hold mass audiences. Once
audiences become fragmented, the commercial logic erodes.
And that’s not all. New technologies like Personal Video
Recorders (PVRs) – essentially recorders which use hard drives
rather than tape and are much easier to program – are enabling
viewers to determine their own viewing schedules and – more
significantly – to avoid advertisements. Think of Sky Plus.
Think of TiVO. As the CEO of Yahoo said recently at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the era of “appointment-to-view”
TV is coming to an end.
Note that when I say that broadcast TV is declining, I am NOT
saying that it will disappear. That’s what John Seely Brown
calls “endism’ and it’s not the way ecologists think. Broadcast
will continue to exist, for the simple and very good reason that
some things are best covered using a few-to-many technology.
Only a broadcast model can deal with something like a World Cup
final or a major terrorist attack, for example – when the
attention of the world is focussed on a single event or a single
place. But broadcast will lose its dominant position in the
ecosystem, and that is the change that I think will have really
profound consequences for us all.
~oOo~
What will replace broadcast TV as the new dominant organism in
our media ecosystem? Simple: the ubiquitous Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
9
Note that I do not say the Web. The biggest mistake people in
the media business make is to think that the Net and the Web are
synonymous.
They’re not. Of course the Web – as I intimated earlier -- is
enormous, but it’s just one kind of traffic that runs on the
Internet’s tracks and signalling. And already the Web is being
dwarfed by other kinds of traffic. According to data gathered by
the Cambridge firm Cachelogic, peer-to-peer networking traffic
now exceeds Web traffic by a factor of between two and ten,
depending on the time of day. And I’ve no doubt that in ten
years’ time, P2P traffic will be outrun by some other ingenious
networking application, as yet undiscovered.
Already the signs of the Net’s approaching centrality are
everywhere. We see it, for example,
• in the astonishing penetration of broadband access in
developed countries,
• in the explosive growth of e-commerce,
• in the streaming of audio – and, increasingly, video
across the Net,
• in the sudden interest of Rupert Murdoch and other
broadcasters in acquiring broadband companies,
• in declining newspaper sales and the growth of online
news
• and in the stupendous growth of internet telephony –
spurred by the realisation that, sooner rather than
later, all voice telephony will be done over the Net.9
9 “It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional
telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry
are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony
will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive
to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in
short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape.” Economist, 15
September, 2005.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
10
Oh and I almost forgot to mention the looming implications
of Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) technology, together with Wi-
Fi and mesh networking.
And then there’s the fact that you can now buy episodes of
popular US TV series on the Apple iTunes store, download them
onto your computer – and watch them on your sparkling new Video
iPod.
Oh and there’s BBC Radio’s “listen again” facility, whereby if
you miss a programme (the Archers, say) you can always click on a
link and have it streamed to your computer at a time that suits
you.
And I haven’t mentioned, have I, that you can do the same for
24 hours with BBC2’s Newsnight programme?
And of course there’s Google, a phenomenon that deserves an
entire lecture to itself.
~oOo~
What does this mean?
Well, first of all, these developments illustrate the extent
to which the Internet is becoming central to our lives.
In 1999, Andy Grove, who was then the CEO of Intel, made a
famous prediction. In five years’ time, he said, all companies
will be Internet companies or they won’t be companies at all.10
At the time, people laughed. Did he mean that every hamburger
joint and hardware store would have to be online by 2004? What a
ridiculous idea!
In fact it was an exceedingly insightful prediction. What
Grove meant was that the Internet would move from being something
rather exotic to being a kind of utility like electricity or the
telephone. None of us today could envisage being in business
without making use of both. As the Economist, put it,
10 Economist, 24 June, 1999
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
11
“The Internet is helping companies to lower costs
dramatically across their supply and demand chains, take
their customer service into a different league, enter new
markets, create additional revenue streams and redefine
their business relationships. What Mr Grove was really
saying was that if in five years’ time a company is not
using the Internet to do some or all of these things, it
will be destroyed by competitors who are.”11
The point of all this is that while we grew up and came to
maturity in a media ecosystem dominated by broadcast TV, our
children and grandchildren will live in an environment dominated
by the Net. And the interesting question – the point, in a way,
of this lecture – is what will that mean for us, and for them?
~oOo~
In thinking about the future, the two most useful words are
‘push’ and ‘pull’ because they capture the essence of where we’ve
been and where we’re headed.
Broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium. By that I mean that a
relatively select band of producers (broadcasters) decide what
content is to be created, create it and then push it down
analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to
consist of essentially passive recipients.
The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this
world. He did, of course, have some freedom of action. He could
choose to switch off the TV; but if he decided to leave it on,
then essentially his freedom of action was confined to choosing
from a menu of options decided for him by others, and to
‘consuming’ their content at times decided by them. He was, in
other words, a human surrogate for one of BF Skinner’s pigeons –
free to peck at whatever coloured lever took his fancy, but not
free at all in comparison with his fellow-pigeon perched outside
on the roof.
11 ibid.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
12
The other essential feature of the world of push media was its
fundamental asymmetry. All the creative energy was assumed to be
located at one end (the producer/broadcaster). The viewer or
listener was assumed to be incapable of, or uninterested in,
creating content; and even if it turned out that he was capable
of creative activity, there was no way in which anything he
produced could have been published.
Looking back, the most astonishing thing about the broadcastdominated
world was how successful it was for so long in keeping
billions of people in thrall. Networks could pull in audiences
in the tens of millions for successful and popular broadcasts –
and pitch their advertising rates accordingly. Small wonder that
one owner of a UK ITV franchise (I think it was Roy Thompson)
described commercial television (in public) as “a licence to
print money”.
But in fact the dominance of the push model was an artefact of
the state of technology. Analogue transmission technology
severely limited the number of channels that could be broadcast
through the ether, so consumer choice was restricted by the laws
of analogue electronics. The advent of (analogue) cable and
satellite transmission and, later, digital technology changed all
that and began to hollow-out the push model from within.
The Internet – and particularly the Web – is exactly the
opposite of this. The Web is a pull medium. Nothing comes to
you unless you choose it and click on it to ‘pull’ it down onto
your computer. You’re in charge. In the words of Rupert
Murdoch’s daughter, Elizabeth, the Web is a “sit up” medium, in
contrast to TV, which is a “sit back” medium.
So the first implication of the switch from push to pull is a
radical increase in consumer sovereignty. We saw this early on
in e-commerce, because it became easy to compare online prices
and locate the most competitive suppliers from the comfort of
your own armchair. Just one illustration: over 80 per cent of
prospective customers nowadays turn up at Ford dealerships in the
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
13
US armed not only with information about particular models, but
also with detailed data on the prices that dealers elsewhere in
the country are charging for those models.12
We’re now seeing this in other areas too – for example in the
way prospective students click their way through the websites of
competing universities while deciding which ones to apply to.
But the Internet doesn’t just enable people to become more
fickle and choosy consumers. It also makes them much better
informed – or at least provides them with formidable resources
with which to become more knowledgeable. Search technology is
the key to this. In an interesting recent book, The Search, John
Battelle describes the dramatic effects that search engines like
Google are having on the advertising and marketing industries.
“In the past few years”, he writes, “search has become a
universally understood method of navigating our
information universe: much as the Windows interface
defined our interactions with the personal computer,
search defines our interactions with the Internet. Put a
search box in front of just about anybody, and he’ll know
what to do with it. And the aggregate of all those
searches, it turns out, is knowable: it constitutes the
database of our intentions”. 13
The Internet and related communications technologies are
making people more connected. The average person today interacts
with far more people than her father did. As the Economist puts
it in a recent article:
“A famous 1967 study by Stanley Milgram (which
later became the basis for a film) suggested that
there were at most “six degrees of separation”
between any two people in America, meaning that the
12 “Crowned at last”, Economist, 31 March, 2005.
13 John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of
Business and Transformed Our Culture, Portfolio, 2005, page 4.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
14
chain of acquaintances between them never had more
than six links. According to more recent work along
similar lines, that number has now fallen to 4.6,
despite the growth in America's population since
Milgram's study. Being able to keep in touch with a
much wider range of people through technologies
such as e-mail has brought everyone closer.”14
The Internet is also making it much harder for companies to
keep secrets. If one of your products has flaws, or if a service
you provide is sub-standard, then the chances are that the news
will appear somewhere on a Blog or a posting to a newsgroup or
email list. There was a celebrated case of this some time ago
with Kryptonite bike locks which – it turned out – could be
opened by anyone equipped with a Bic biro. The company knew of
the flaw, but did nothing until news of it was published on a
cycling website. And then all hell broke loose.15
And in the last few months, the giant Sony corporation has
been crucified because of the discovery – first published on a
Blog – that copy-protection software on Sony music disks was
covertly installing software on customers’ PCs which could
compromise their security. It’s not clear exactly when Sony had
become aware of the problem but when the story finally broke --
on a techie’s Blog -- the company’s various inept attempts at
denial and damage-limitation were relentlessly exposed and
discredited by enraged consumers hunting in virtual packs.16
My conjecture therefore is that nobody who offers a public
service will be immune from this aspect of a ubiquitous Net. And
with every day that passes we see other examples. Take for
instance the maddening hypocrisy of companies whose call centres
14 “The New Organisation”, Economist, 21 January, 2006.
15 “Lock, stock and caught over a barrel”, Observer, 26 September, 2004. Online
at: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1312736,00.html
16 See “How Sony became an Ugly Sister”, Observer, 18 December, 2005. Online at
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1669722,00.html
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
15
give you a recorded message saying that they really value your
call and then drag you through a Kafkaesque maze for 20 minutes
before you get even a chance to talk to a human being. There’s
now a useful website17 on which users post the key codes needed to
bypass the maze. For Citibank in the US, for example, the
sequence you need is 0#0#0#0#0#0#! And the name of this site?
Why www.gethuman.com
Some years ago, I gave a presentation at a seminar in
Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on the future of information
technology and how it might affect the health service.
The thing I remember most from the event is a statement made
by a quietly-spoken medical researcher from the National
Institute of Health. The biggest challenge General Practitioners
will face in 2010, he said, was “how to deal with the Internetinformed
patient”.
And I don’t think he was joking.
The emergence of a truly sovereign, informed consumer is thus
one of the implications of an Internet-centric world. The days
when companies could assume that the only really demanding
customers they were likely to encounter were those who subscribed
to Which? are over.
Another implication is that the asymmetry of the old, pushmedia
world may be replaced by something much more balanced.
Remember that the underlying assumption of the old broadcast
model was that audiences are passive and uncreative.
What we’re now discovering is that that passivity and apparent
lack of creativity may have been more due to the absence of tools
and publication opportunities than to intrinsic defects in human
nature. Certainly, that’s the only explanation I can think of
for what’s been happening on the Net in the last few years.
17 http://www.gethuman.com/us/
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
16
Take Blogging – the practice of keeping an online diary.
There are millions and millions of the things – when I last
checked the other night Technorati, a Blog-tracking service, was
claiming to be monitoring over 28.9 million, and the number of
them is doubling every five and a half months. The current
creation rate is 75,000 a day – that’s about one a second.18 Many
of them are, as you might expect, mere dross – vanity publishing
with no discernible literary or intellectual merit. But
something like 13 million Blogs were still being updated three
months after their initial creation, and many of them contain
writing and thinking of a very high order. In my own areas of
professional interest, for example, Blogs are always my most
trusted online sources, because I know many of the people who
write them, and some of them are world experts in their fields.19
What is significant about the Blogging phenomenon is its
demonstration that the traffic in ideas and cultural products
isn’t a one-way street – as it was in the old push-media ecology.
People have always been thoughtful and articulate and wellinformed,
but up to now relatively few of them ever made it past
the gatekeepers who controlled access to publication media.
Blogging software and the Internet gave them the platform they
needed – and boy have they grasped the opportunity!
The other remarkable explosion of creativity comes from
digital photography. In the last few years an enormous number of
digital cameras have been sold – and of course many mobile phones
now come with an onboard camera. The trend is so pronounced that
even the biggest names in photography are getting out of film.
Kodak decided to stop making film cameras some time ago.
Recently, Nikon announced that it was planning the same thing.
18 Dave Sifri, “State of the Blogosphere, February 2006”, online at
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/02/81.html
19 For example, Professor Ed Felten of Princeton, a leading expert on digital
rights management, encryption and related issues whose Blog
(http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) is a must-read for anyone interested in
these arcane but important matters.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
17
And Konica Minolta has now announced that it too is going
completely digital.
So every day, millions of digital photographs are taken.
Until the advent of a site called Flickr.com, an understandable
response to this statement would have been “so what?” But Flickr
allows people to upload their pictures and display them on the
Web, each neatly resized and allocated its own unique URL. And
it has grown like crazy – to the point where it was acquired by
Yahoo20 in March 2005 for an undisclosed pile of serious money.
I don’t know how many photographs Flickr holds, but it already
run into many millions.21 For me, the most interesting aspect of
it is that users are encouraged to attach tags to their pictures,
and these tags can be used as the basis for searches of the
entire database. The other day I searched for photographs tagged
with ‘Ireland’ and came up with 122,000 images! (A month
earlier, the same search had come up with 85,000.) Of course I
didn’t sift through them all, but I must have looked at a few
hundred. They were mostly holiday and casual snapshots, but here
and there were some truly beautiful images. What struck me most,
though, was what they represented. Ten years ago, those
snapshots would have wound up in a shoebox and would certainly
never have been seen in a public forum. But now they can be –
and are being – published, shared with others, made available to
the world. And this is something new. And something important
for those of us who aspire to reach audiences with our messages.
~oOo~
What I’m really trying to say is that the world has changed
out of all recognition already. And if I’m right about the
20 “A Flickr of the digital camera switch and the folksonomy system is born”,
Observer, 27 November, 2005. Online at:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1651448,00.html
21 In December 2004, Salon.com was reporting 2.2 million and growing at a rate
of 30,000 per day. See http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/12/20/flickr/.
These estimates are now seriously out of date.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
18
analogy with printing, this is just the beginning. We ain’t seen
nothin’ yet.
Now it would be impertinent of me to try to spell out what all
this might mean for you. You know your own business best. But
here’s a salutary tale and a closing thought.
The thought is that no industry can afford to ignore what’s
going on, even if it thinks that the Internet is nothing to do
with it.
If you want a case study of this, consider what happened to
the music industry.
In the early 1980s, recorded music went digital with the
arrival of the compact disk. Recording studios pumped out music
as streams of ones and zeroes; and at the consumer end, CD
players translated those ones and zeroes back into sounds. The
problem was: how to get those ones and zeroes – those digital
bitstreams – from studio to player. The solution was to burn the
bits onto plastic disks and distribute those to consumers. That
meant making the disks, burning the music onto them, printing
labels, packing them into boxes (which always seemed to break),
packing the boxes into bigger boxes, putting those on pallets,
loading the pallets onto trucks, delivering them to warehouses,
who then delivered them to retailers, who took the disks out of
the boxes and put the boxes on display and… I could go on, but
you will see what a wasteful, inefficient, brain-dead way that
was for distributing a product.
Nevertheless, the record industry built a very cosy business
out of this. There was one small problem: the economics of
producing and shipping disks meant that there was little
commercial mileage in selling single tracks, so the industry
focussed on selling albums and increasingly ignored the consumer
demand for tracks. And it might have continued doing this
forever, but for one thing: the Internet.
UK Marketing Society Keynote Address: 28 February, 2006
19
In 1999 a disaffected music lover called Shawn Fanning sat
down and wrote some software which enabled people easily to
locate and share music tracks over the Net. He called it
Napster. Within 18 months, Napster had 80 million subscribers,
swapping millions of tracks every hour of every day. The music
industry eventually got Napster shut down, but by then the genie
was out of the bottle. And even today, as I speak, millions of
music tracks are being illicitly shared across the Net (remember
that CacheLogic survey of Internet traffic), and the only hope
for the music industry is to fall in with the legal downloading
services offered by companies like Apple with its iTunes Store.
Since it opened the store, Apple has sold a million tracks a day,
and last week celebrated the sale of its billionth song.
One of the defensive arguments used by the record companies to
justify their existence – not to mention their stock options --
was that only they could find and nurture talent. Without them,
so they implied, the Rolling Stones and U2 would still be playing
in pubs, clubs and student raves. Well, I don’t know if you’ve
heard of a Sheffield band called the Arctic Monkeys, but I’m
willing to bet your kids have. They’ve suddenly become the
biggest band in Britain. And they did it by releasing their
music – free – on their website, and letting fans spread it by
word of mouth. Eventually a record label came begging to be
allowed to take them on. It is bands like Arctic Monkeys, not
record companies, that are the future of the music business.
Nobody is indispensable any more.
The moral of the story is that you ignore changes in the
communications ecology at your peril. Remember what Andy Grove
said all those years ago. Companies that are not Internet
companies won’t be companies at all.
Thanks to http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/nic/keynote-hindu.pdf
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