Technology Futures

This article discusses falling ad revenue for social networking sites. That probably explains why the ads on FaceBook seem sleazier lately. About every other time I log in, I get pummeled with an ad to meet "sexy singles in Blacksburg," along with what is supposed to be an example of a "sexy single" in a bikini. Bottom fishing ads like this one may be helping to pay the bills on these sites, but as the sleaze factor goes up, more parents are going to start declaring the sites off-limits to their kids.

An October, 2008 study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project supports other data showing that more and more people are not bothering with the TV anymore. Among all adults, Pew reports that TV viewing has declined 25% in the past year. Among 18-49 year olds, a slightly higher average of 28%. What this means is that if the trend continues at about the same rate, no one will be watching TV in less than a decade. What has replaced TV? The Internet.

The New York Times is taking a mortgage on its office building in Manhattan because it can't pay its bills. The LA Times has filed for bankruptcy. Many local papers are quietly going out of business. The newspaper is a venerable icon, but smearing ink on dead trees is, well, dead. Newspapers have failed utterly to adapt to the Internet, largely because they have been unable to distinguish between their core competency and their historical distribution medium. Newspapers have stubbornly clung to the notion that it is their job to throw wads of paper in driveways every morning. They have continued to do that long after there have been better and different ways to distribute the news (e.g. the Internet). Tweaking the font size of headlines, adding color pictures, and reposting news articles to the Web for a day or two before making them disappear are strategies that have only slightly delayed the inevitable.

The core competency of newspapers has always been to filter the news for readers; printing that news on dead trees has simply been the expedient way to distribute their work efforts for the past couple of hundred years. But we still need editors and reporters--in fact, we need them now more than ever--we have more news, from more sources.

The blogosphere has risen to the challenge while the old guard of reporters and editors have simply turned up their noses and pounded their chests about how they are "professionals" and bloggers are just sitting around in their pajamas. To coin a phrase: "Whatever...."

We still need news organizations, and there is plenty of ad money sloshing around online, but the newspaper business has just refused to adapt. It will be interesting to see how the void is filled.

With the downturn in the economy, we are likely to see many more weak social networking business ventures fail. It Died is likely to do very well for the next year or so as it documents flops like People Connection, Flip.com, and Pownce. It's like the remake of an old horror movie--The Return of the Dot.Com Swamp Thing.

As I have said many times before, the fact that you can mash up Twitter, file sharing, and instant messaging (the Pownce strategy) does not mean you should, or that there will be a market for it. Social networking tools and sites have a place in the digital world, but there are so many that we can make use of at any given time. For the time being, FaceBook and MySpace have probably won.