> And to keep making money in these markets — already a ridiculous $27 in ARPU for the last three months of 2017 — they need us to give more time and attention to them.
And that there is the Achilles' heel of both Google and Facebook: disrupting the attention market.
I've been having a debate with someone on this subject, and it prompted me to run a consumer survey asking people: "Thinking about free services (e.g., print, radio, TV, websites), do you like it when they sell your attention to advertisers?" Yes, No, Undecided.
Of 511 responses, only 6% liked having their attention sold. 68% dislike it, and 26% were on the fence.
Personally, I think there is a huge opportunity to re-invent the attention market. Until then, companies like Google and Facebook will keep stealing our attention and selling it to the highest bidder.
> How was Google making a living before advertising?
It wasn't. Every search engine at the time had struggled to make money. It wasn't until Google "borrowed" pay-per-click auction bidding from Overture that advertising became their focus.
I suspect they'd planned to roll out enterprise products. (You know - "the box" - like they did in Silicon Valley). That business started later (circa 2002):
BUT the ideas are easy. The problem is market testing each idea to see what works.
ProductHunt is going in the right direction - but unfortunately the products are already built with little or no market testing so I predict a high failure rate.
KickStarter is a nice way to see if there is some market demand, but also a high failure rate (55%) by people who lack the experience to execute.
It sounds like Andy Hunt has finally discovered ISO 9000. Plan. Implement. Measure. Review. Improve.
The pattern I keep seeing is the IT community's need to re-invent the wheel and give it names like 'agile', 'scrum', etc. Why can't people call a wheel a wheel?
And that there is the Achilles' heel of both Google and Facebook: disrupting the attention market.
I've been having a debate with someone on this subject, and it prompted me to run a consumer survey asking people: "Thinking about free services (e.g., print, radio, TV, websites), do you like it when they sell your attention to advertisers?" Yes, No, Undecided.
Of 511 responses, only 6% liked having their attention sold. 68% dislike it, and 26% were on the fence.
Personally, I think there is a huge opportunity to re-invent the attention market. Until then, companies like Google and Facebook will keep stealing our attention and selling it to the highest bidder.