virtualeconomics

Spider on Mencken

I've spent most of my copious spare time (joke here) this past week or so re-reading the glorious Transmetropolitan. Ten collected volumes of utter barking genius, and I thought I'd share with you one of my favourite bits, a quote from H L Mencken that appears about halfway through book six:

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic he personally he is very apt to spread discontent amongst those who are."

Advertising Archaeology #3

Part of an occasional series, here is the latest advertising archaeology kindly provided by the good people of the London Underground as they clean away years of accumulated posters, leaving - in this case -  a film poster from 1996 and therefore a little over 13 years old.

Actually, I will pay for online content...

A few days ago I argued that News Corp was ill-advised to put its newspaper websites behind a paywall and beyond the reach of Google. I as reminded today - as the Times announces a date for its paywall to go up - that personally I must concede one exception to this argument. As I have mentioned here before I buy the Times on Saturday to read Giles Coren's "restaurant review" (in which he does now seem to visit and comment on a restaurant every single week, a submission to restaurant reviewing orthodoxy which I regard mostly with scepticism) and for that reason alone. If the Times is willing to sell me those two pages and just those two pages, online or off, for anything less than the pound it currently charges me for the whole Saturday paper I will cheerfully pay up. (Of course, its advertisers may become more wary of paying to reach 600,000 daily readers if everyone is finally forced to admit that some of those readers are only reading two pages of the magazine supplement and not likely, therefore, to pay much attention to the car ads on page seven of the bit they threw away unexamined. Still, that's digital fragmentation for you.)

So when Techdirt points out that the various surveys saying people will (or alternatively won't) pay for content online are a lot less reliable than seeing what happens when someone actually starts charging*, I have to agree. Would I pay for content online? Yes, under one extremely hypothetical commercial model. Do I think that model will ever be made available to me? Almost certainly not. So what's the right answer to the very general question "will I pay for content online?" I guess it's a maybe or a probably not.  

*We already know this bit from long experimentation, of course - all the readers go away. Still, the last experiments in this field were carried out several years ago before everyone spent their time online playing on social networks, listening to music and watching streaming video, so it would be easy to argue that the circumstances have changed significantly. Got worse, specifically, from the point of view of charging for content. But getting worse is still a change.

King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks

King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks
Originally uploaded by vigornian

From my friend Vigornian - signage indicates that King's Cross caters for both gentlemen and Daleks. "I couldn't help admiring the station's fine cross-species tolerance. Ood, Judoon etc must hold it in until they get home, obviously".

Who Stalkin?

Maybe you've all seen this one already but I only came across it today - http://whostalkin.com. (HT: j4.) Best vanity search I've ever found, far more interesting than bunging your own name into Google. (Well, my name anyway. Your mileage may vary - maybe Google knows more interesting things about you). But I found a bunch of stuff I'd somehow missed the first time around (on which subject, Hi Grant! Thanks!). Recommend.

Making money from your own clicks

Scott Adams - who regular readers will know I admire to the point of considering automatic first choice for world president, should such a position become magically available - pointed out yesterday that shopping broken. The Internet expands choice beyond utility; confusopolies render much of the choice meaningless; advertising is mostly just noise obviating the signal.

He proposes a "hunter becomes the prey" solution in which instead of being bombarded with misleading advertisements for products people get to post up the details of the thing they want ("two weeks in Aruba"; "a toaster"; "I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home. It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I'm on a budget") and then let the relevant products find them. Transfer the costs, quite rightly, from consumers having to wade through ads trying to find the product they really want to providers having to wade through ads trying to find the consumer who really wants their product.

Vin came up with this in 2004 - the Internet-mediated demand-led market. And, perhaps even more interestingly, people already do it. I already do it. When I organised a ski holiday a few years ago I ended up, naturally enough, with a wiki which had all the details of our requirements on. "12 people chalet France November 2006", said the wiki, and sure enough

(a) Google started serving us ads that gave us just that and

(b) buying it, via a click from our own wiki, made us some money from the referral fee.  

It's the second bit that always strikes me as funny. You can already do this stuff, if you can be bothered to knock up a web page and run AdWords over it, and assuming you can describe the thing you want to buy reasonably accurately you can even get paid for buying it.

Box office records sans frontiers

Very taken today by @kevglobal's point that "The new Call of Duty game made $310m in 24 hrs. Largest grossing movie of all time (Titanic) made $600m in 2 months". This blog and your newspaper and Twitter and Cormac McCarthy's The Road and going for a walk in the rain and playing the piano are all competing asymmetrically for the same finite, dwindling pool of attention and today Call of Duty is coming out on top - no surprise there really though since, per hour of entertainment, a good video game is ludicrously underpriced compared to a film and only a long book is really in the same ballpark.

Bong!

If you don't already follow big_ben_clock on Twitter, you really should.

It goes "bong", you see.

(You might also, if you like receiving a photo of a horse most days that I remember, enjoy following my own daily_horse.)

From status to contract and back again; or, an unexpected end to the rule of law

Apparently bankers' contracts are no longer subject to the rule of law but may be torn up by the FSA if (let's not be too sweeping or vague here) the FSA damned well feels like it.

Like Stephen Pollard I am...more than a little concerned now about entering into any sort of private contract allegedly governed by the laws of England and Wales in case the Chancellor decides public opinion is in favour of tearing it up. I quite liked the certainty of owning my house because I paid for it and the security of receiving an income to do my job because I had agreed this with my employer. After today I am left merely hoping that Alastair Darling does not take exception to either of these arrangements, or rather does not hallucinate that some demagogue or other has called for him to arbitrarily dismantle them. 

The transformation of medieval institutions and habits into modern ones is often rightly described in terms of a shift from status to contract. For agreements between free individuals to be even possible those individuals must have some reasonable confidence that contracts will be honoured and therefore they must believe that those contracts will be enforced. Now...well, it would be sensible for us to have a little less confidence that they will be, is all. And perhaps it would be more sensible to do business somewhere else - somewhere operating more under the rule of law and less under the whim of a dying political party's guess as to which way the wind is blowing. 

Because it isn't there

I've commented before on the sense of taking news articles out of Google's index (there isn't any)...but since Murdoch is planning (or, according to some commentators, is pretending to plan) to take News Corp's content off Google by some time next year the idea is worth another look.

The problem with trying to re-silo content at tis stage in the game is threefold.

First, online consumers do not have a problem finding content or finding specific content. In fact, that's the opposite of the problem we face. Content is dyfunctionally abundant. There is so much of it that the problem is filtering through the billions of pages/articles/songs/photos/films/games/posts/tweets for something useful, entertaining or relevant. Take some of the content away and unless it is actually unique you've made searchers' lives a little bit easier (thanks!).

Second, and relatedly, if I'm looking for commentary on the latest NYTco quarterlies and some of the potentially useful information doesn't show up in my search because it has been deliberately withheld from the engine, I'll never know. People resopond to incentives. Hiding content from me when I search doesn't incentivise me to try any other particular alternative behaviour (I'm going to realise that the article which would have answered all my questions is on the New York Post website but since Google doesn't know about it I have to surf over there and look for it? Just how am I going to know that?).

Third, content in a silo will attract no new readers. Two years ago I didn't read Marginal Revolution, but I found it and now I do. Ditto Unqualified Reservations. Ditto...well, everything in my feedreader. It's an interesting idea to run a paid content business that no-one can find. I wouldn't fancy it myself. Newspapers have enough demographic problems without shutting themselves off to the main potential source of new readers.

Mike Arrington theorises that the end-game is for content-providers to cut deals with other (non-Google) search engines, leaving Google high and dry but the content catalogued and searchable somewhere. Fair enough. Assuming that different providers cut deals with different engines (otherwise it's not a market and we've just swapped the Googlopoly for the Bingopoly, whoop-de-doo) we'd be looking at a potentially massive inconvenience for users with no upside benefits at all as they jumped from engine to engine searching for different content. Happily such a deliberate fragmentation of search ignores the existence of adequate search aggregation tools that pre-emptively obviate the obstacles. Data that can be usefully brought together online generally is, because it can be, because that's how it's most useful (hence indeed, err, Google). Trying at this stage in the game to fragment it all again is no solution, it's just another cycle around while someone knocks up a better aggregator.

Digital channels fragment media. They fragmented music, so now we find songs by the track on iTunes and Spotify instead of buying albums. But where the music industry continues to enjoy inherent commercial upside from its fragmented content (iTunes cost money, Spotify has unskippable ads or subs to pay, ringtones are a goldmine) text content has no such inherent commercial upside as a distributed fragment. Read an article on a newspaper website and you see an ad. Read the same content on Google or in Bloglines and you don't. The problem to solve here is not to stop people finding the stuff and reading it on Google - it's to make money when they see it there, to embed some inherent commercial upside in that experience. RSS banners, universal IntelliTXT, anything that follows the content around and makes money from it wherever it's seen. Hell, even movies manage it with product placement and one day they'll work out how to charge extra for all the millions of times those placements are seen by BitTorrenters.

But take the content off Google and I no longer know it exists, and I'm not going to use three or four different search engines to check every time I have a query. Hide it and it simply isn't there.