Mixing Ads and Content

Chris Anderson, curator of TED and author of The Long Tail is a smart guy. And his book on the economics of Free makes for interesting reading. In that book, he points out an interesting difference between the physical and digital worlds when it comes to placement of ads and content.


Anderson points out that traditional media build a Chinese Wall “between their editorial and advertising teams, to ensure that advertisers cannot influence the editorial e.g. by ensuring that a car ad is not next to a car story or a Sony ad anywhere near our reviews of Sony products.” In the digital world, he points out that companies like Google do the exact opposite: they match ads with content!


Having made this observation, he then tries to analyze why such matching is taboo in print but so successful online…and with no loss of credibility?


I was surprised Anderson doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. In print, the magazine/newspaper is the content provider as well as the one placing the ads. But Google is not a content provider. It only points you to the relevant content.


Lots of people seem to miss this critical difference (pointing to information v/s creating that information). Including judges in several European countries who think that Google should be held accountable for what’s posted on YouTube!


Part of the reason for this mistake is that people want to classify Google into an existing industry. And they’ve chosen media as that industry. Why media? Because Google makes almost all of its money via ads (which is the way most media companies make their money). Unfortunately, it’s force-fitting Google into such a category that leads to all these perceived paradoxes. Even for a guy like Anderson.

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