In a guest post on TechCrunch.com today, by Eric Clemons, a Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania”, who argues that Internet advertising is: "not trusted, not wanted and not needed, and that PPC advertising will not last."
The Professor’s comments are already making the rounds on Twitter and are certainly controversial enough to get a lot of play. The original post on TechCrunch already has over 350 comments.
Lets look at some of the more interest points from Professor Clemons post:
"Internet advertising will rapidly lose its value and its impact, for reasons that can easily be understood."
"Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the Internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars."
"Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most Internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him."
"Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising".
"Advertising will fail for three reasons:
There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:
"This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid."
"Google it seems ultimately to be unsustainable. More significantly from the perspective of this post, it is not scalable; it is not possible for every website to earn its revenue from sponsored search and ultimately at least some of them will need to find an alternative revenue model."
"Misdirection will fail totally and completely."
What a total load of bullshit. :nopenope: discuss...
The Professor’s comments are already making the rounds on Twitter and are certainly controversial enough to get a lot of play. The original post on TechCrunch already has over 350 comments.
Lets look at some of the more interest points from Professor Clemons post:
"Internet advertising will rapidly lose its value and its impact, for reasons that can easily be understood."
"Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the Internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars."
"Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most Internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him."
"Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising".
"Advertising will fail for three reasons:
There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:
- Consumers do not trust advertising.
- Consumers do not want to view advertising.
- And mostly consumers do not need advertising."
"This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid."
"Google it seems ultimately to be unsustainable. More significantly from the perspective of this post, it is not scalable; it is not possible for every website to earn its revenue from sponsored search and ultimately at least some of them will need to find an alternative revenue model."
"Misdirection will fail totally and completely."
What a total load of bullshit. :nopenope: discuss...
