September 19, 2007

The Death of TimesSelect and the Future of Web Advertising

The New York Times just dropped TimesSelect, their online premium content subscription program. The program ran for two years and was generating about $10 million a year in revenue. Content previously restricted to subscribers is now available to all.

The reason for the change is simple: money. The Times can make more of it by switching to an advertising-based model.

There's a lesson in this, and it's not that information wants to be free.

Now, I remember a time when not quite every cultural product was a vehicle for advertising, a lure for eyeballs. The web circa 1998 was like this. If you were there, you know what I mean. It was cool. But of course the web circa 1998 was a rare respite (or semi-respite, really) from the deluge.

I reveal both my age and my idealism by mentioning this.

The Immediate Future of Web Advertising

Back in the real world, as it were, I've been meaning to note my appreciation for the advertising network approach used by The Deck, particularly the fact that they only accept ads for products or services they've bought or used themselves. It's a crafty move, too, since it adds cred to the ads that appear. (The Deck adds even more cred by being selective about who gets to join the network.) But the Deck, as an idea, doesn't scale easily, so it's hard to see it becoming a widely adopted approach.

The big money, of course, is in targeted ads. The more you know about your individual readers (and evidently the Times, a registration-based site, knows quite a bit), the more you can charge advertisers to hit them up.

I'm awaiting the day, not far off, when I encounter ads aimed directed at me and addressing me by name. This will work much like Amazon's personalized recommendations except the ads will appear on sites I never previously visited and will reveal an uncanny and terrifying insight into my deepest desires.

And what will these ads be about? Ad blockers. They'll all be trying to selling me new and novel ways to stem the deluge.

Published in Ads, WWW