DISQUS

A slowdown, certainly, but ironically I think that'll strengthen web businesses as consumers bring their time and cash online.

On house prices, for me they're here to stay. Agree that they're ludicrous but supply is awful owing to planning laws and the speed at which the planning authorities work (they are and have always been a nightmare in the South-East at least) and demand is voracious. Factor in London 2012 sucking labour away from developers and prices are only going in one direction.

Epic post.

It's interesting to the note that scientists have been openly and publicly questioning/verifying theories certainly since the seventeenth-century (qv Karl Popper for the theory and, for example, quantum physics at the beginning on the twentieth-century for the practice). Writers, artists, academics, theorists etc have been doing this for millenia. It can get seriously bitchy. It's not new, but certainly agree that more people are being exposed to it now that they can 'publish' their thoughts to the world. Also, whilst not a very postmodern sentiment, perhaps many ideas should be treated like treasured possessions: they all thought blood circulation, plate techtonics, quantum physics, even flying, were crackpot ideas. What about the idea of organizing the world's information? Crazy ;)

Hi Nic,

Out of interest, do you think startups with a 'nailed on business model' such as Wonga or MoveMe are going to get 10-20M users even if they go global? Put another way, won't the specificity of the model limit the number of users but increase the likelihood/reduce the risk of making a fat profit?

If you've ever spent too much time in the company of optimistic entrepreneuers/financiers, try John Gray's 'Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions' and 'Straw Dogs'. He's been at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and now at the LSE and relative to your post it's, well, thought-provoking stuff to say the least :)

Nic,

I don't think the advertising industry will ever be able effectively to 'push' personalised advertising onto consumers. Too many of us, way too complex and from the evidence of history that type of control runs against the grain of human nature. I certainly think consumers can and will 'pull' personalised advertising towards them if it suits their needs/they benefit from it.

Hi Nic,

On both innovations: great stuff.

Specific to the WAYN initiative, the social network Perfspot are experimenting in this area as well with Cartfly and I suspect a major UK media group will try something along these lines in 2008 as there's a lot of interest in this reward-for-attention concept. Also think some 'full service' shopping engines will provide personalised shopping malls on a rev share basis in addiition to all the normal shopping info one finds on such sites.

Certainly agree this could be huge and all made possible by CPA which, for me, will be the revenue model that will underpin some really interesting work in the future.

Hic Nic,

Apologies if this has been covered in the posts/links but it's human to want to do what everybody else is doing, to find out what the fuss is all about. Perhaps this is one of the fundamental drivers?

Nic, very interesting post.

Agree about brands needing to engage for our attention but I wonder about the argument that brand power is waning/will wane. Fundamental to the majority of good and enduring brands is an enduring product or service and that costs serious money and time to produce. If I go climbing in mountians I'm not going to take a chance of 'New-fleece-product' recommended by Jim from Sheffield above The North Face. If I'm reading a literary novel, I'm not going to download one from the net because Henrietta from Bath gave me the nod when Penguin offer me a Nobel prize winner like Coetzee. The North Face and Coetzee are quality products and I trust them. This applies to new website ventures as well.

Teasing out the logic of this, and with reference to recommendatios from the net, why should I trust the recommendation from some stranger on the net? Some of my friends are miserable gits, some are incredibly optimistic. This informs their views and I'm aware of that and they are aware of that. We all operate like this, sifting and editing information as each day progresses.

Yes, advertising is going to change irrevocably owing to technology, our ability to track the efficacy of that advertisong through technology, because of the massive over-supply of advertising/media space relative to a gently increasing pot of advertising, because of the massive over-supply of content for people's attention. Will brands suffer? To take the extreme, I'm not going to put my life on the line up a mountain because of some recommendation via Google - I'll bank on the brand.

With information overload, perhaps brands are ideally placed to strengthen their positions??

Morning Nic,

It's the CPA bit that's most compelling for me. On a practical level, what if buy.at evolved from a network into a platform from which site owners/entrepreneurs could take a wide range of content (CPA feeds, ads, product specs, competitions, reviews, images, videos etc, etc). This would encourage advertisers to innovate and would unleash creativity in site owners.

The growth of social networks has come from the demand side, ie individuals wanting to express themselves or communicate. I think the advertising industry could help unlock a similar pattern of growth if they morphed ad networks into platforms. All CPA, all accountable, low-risk for advertisers etc.

It would be great if advertisers offered us 'advertiser generated content' that we could better build into the heart of sites. All done on a CPA basis such that the effort needed to generate creative advertising content is rewarded by a low-risk ad model. Yes, there are glimpses of this now in product data feeds and some interactive ads but still pretty crude. Advertising mostly still feels like a ring-fenced area on a site. I'm guessing it's on the way and would be a great help for people building sites.

If you like mass market entertainment (say Champions League Football) ITV provide it for free as the reward for attention. The concept is already mass market. Sure, some won't want to engage and will pay to opt out or to feel that they are protecting themselves but I can't see that as the mass market play. In practice, that type of privacy flies in the face of the extraordinary growth of social networks anyway. In theory and practice, it seems illogical. We're already compromised. It's complicity.

CPA technology is still awful to use (yes, Buy.at and Affiliate Window are to an extent exceptions) but when it picks up I fully expect it to merge with what is already an accepted concept, ie reward for attention. If that reward is framed as 'CPF' then great and I hope Sam makes a mint from it :)

Totally agree with Sam on this. Take web advertising models ... there's been a movement from CPM to CPC now to CPA and the next (and last) stage will be sharing the advertiser/marketing budget between the platform (social network, shopping engine etc) and the user whether that be the individual shopper of the influencer (blogger etc). Consumers always engage with people who are giving them what they want relative to the other offerings out there. Social networks are perfectly placed to experiment here.

In theory and practice, AdWords is nice and simple. Facebook's offering *seems* the polar opposite. It's highly theoretical and *seems* to assume the social shopping dynamic will be the same as that of the social network. I've been looking forward to this announcement as well and genuinely thought Facebook might experiment with something along the lines of Jellyfish now that Microsoft own it in order to do something new in the shopping space. The user sharing the benefit of the network etc. Fascinated to see how it pans out but very sceptical unless this is just the first iteration.

Yep, great post. The problem for me is that we literally don't 'breed' it. Professionalism and not entrepreneurialism seems to get handed down generation to generation in the UK. Nought to do with fear, confidence or any other emotion. In my openion, more to do with people's frames of reference.