The Sunday NY Times did a great article on AOL, which tangentially chronicled a very key shift rapidly forming in online consumer behavior. John Battelle already excerpted the best bits, copied in the quotes down below.
Important stuff.
To simplify, searching isn’t so obviously the center of the future universe. The old adage of browsing is rapidly taking on a new life form - call it social, call it exploring, call it stumbling - consumers are rapidly adopting new forms of information navigation that do not follow the paradigm of Search. Media is in a fundamental shift beyond search into personal and community exploration and interaction, and it feels (to me) to be approaching a tipping point.
Perhaps the future no longer belongs solely to the Search Box?
“As advertising is moving from offline media to the Internet at a rapid clip, portals, which command some of the biggest audiences online, should be among the top beneficiaries. Instead, the travails of the mass market portals like AOL, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, indicate a decline in power….
…Part of the challenge for portals is that people are starting to approach the Internet in a different way. A new generation of Web users has grown increasingly adept at finding what it wants online and is less reliant on portals for guidance. What is more, younger audiences are spending more time on social networking sites and less time on traditional Internet portals.
…Social networking sites are not the only culprits. Thousands of smaller Web sites, like blogs, news collectors and niche content sites, are also attracting growing numbers of Internet users and advertisers.”
The in-process SES show in San Jose also provides reinforcing evidence, this from HitWise, as reported by Web Analytics World blog.
Bill Tancer of Hitwise mentioned that in the late 90’s portals such as Excite and Yahoo used to be people’s homepages, in the early 2000’s the homepages changed to search engines and today it’s Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. This should make everyone aware of the importance of having a presence in Social Networking spaces…
While most of the local media world will applaud anything resembling a real threat to the march of Google and the Search Box, the emerging implications for distribution of local advertising are complex and challenging.
Most YP publishers still grapple with bundling and packaging simple search solutions into a tidy, relatively controlled set of distribution partnerships. This emerging trend has the potential to make this a lot more complicated - and potent at the same time. It’s another proof point on the atomization of distribution.
Yellow Pages are adjusting somewhat comfortably to Search - it’s really a familiar world of ad placement…cranked up with smarter technology, limitless targeting and interactivity options galore. But if a growing base of local business and shopping interactions occur via browsing, stumbling, referrals, and exploration, how in the world can you harness or participate in these leads? Whacking a mole isn’t the ideal go-to-market model.
Here are some concepts that I’d put out as “things to start rethinking”.
1. To use the famous Apple tag line, Think Differently.
Think of what you need to do to be in a position to dynamically select, package and distribute your matrix of advertisers into valuable distribution units with micro-local targeting. Think of the infrastructure you’ll need to atomize and reconstruct your advertiser content and ad product packages. Then conceptualize this as dashboard to a constantly changing landscape.
2. Think “YP inside”…pushed outside.
YP needs to be PUSHED OUT, everywhere it can, not relying solely on PULLING IN. Yes, it’s critical to have a differentiated and valuable destination site, but that should be viewed as your “anchor tenancy” strategy - necessary, mission-critical, but not sufficient. You need to find places for your advertisers, and those places are (forever?) spreading and morphing.
3. Relax the rules, open it up.
Lose the “guidelines” that act to restrict distribution creativity and control. You know you’ll be moving to performance based models. As Superpages has already signaled - when you have this mindset, you get a lot less analytical, and a lot more proactive about your distribution network. It takes care of itself when you make money only when your advertiser pays you. Even if you’re not implementing this for 2 years, act like its’ there now.
4. Distribution is not just for ads, it’s for “Ad Applications”.
If your vision is a simple “Ad Network” model, think twice. Ad networks are easily dismantled, and often live on a relatively thin veneer of value and differentiation. Think about how you can couple content + application + buyer-seller interaction into richer “product distribution” models that advertisers will value and consumers will appreciate.
I hope this strikes a chord. I think this is a good time to begin rethinking the local ad distribution model. The shift is happening at a breakneck pace. It can be used to increase your relevance to your advertiser’s business and perhaps wean you off total reliance in Search traffic.
