New media are now old media

Advertising is on it’s way out. What are the new media going to do about it? Act like old media of course!

It used to be the case that the new media was scolding the so-called ‘old media’ for their paid subscription models and paid for CD’s and books. Everything was going to be free and paid for by advertising, after all. Silly old media!

Except now there’s a small snag in that plan. Consumers don’t like advertising and they are finding ways to rid their favorite websites of ads. The adage of ‘everything’s moving toward free’ turns out to mean ‘truly free’ as in ‘free of monetary or brain cycle cost’. So advertising / brainwashing is out.

Don’t make the mistake of saying ‘only geeks use Ad blockers’. I know that’s what many sites are kidding themselves with. But it’s wrong. Right now, Ad blockers are geek territory. But even in the OS X browser Camino it’s only one click to turn it on. This geek-territory will soon be the domain of generic consumers. And consumers will always get their way.

Of course, the ‘new’ media aren’t too happy about this and they’re trying to stop users from using ad blockers like the popular firefox plug in ‘Adblock’ or the one that comes built in with ‘camino. And where old media were complaining about people copying books and CD’s, the new media complain about people using ad blockers. They say “you want stuff to be free? then you have to watch our advertising.”. And Google is making billions. They’re kidding themselvers and many of them will perish if they don’t change their ways. Advertising as we know it today will perish.

It turns out that in the ‘long tail’, when everything is going to be free, that also means: ‘free of advertising’. This is actually an unexpected side effect by even the most visionary pundits. That doesn’t make the conundrum of how to make money on the web any easier, however.

So where do we go from here?