It used to be that there were and handful of media outlets. We the poor masses were expected passively ingest their content. Our only “interaction” was to choose which media source to turn our attention to. Tonight is it NBC or CBS or ABC?
Part of their output streams came from advertisers. We were also expected to passively ingest these parts.
But now there’s been a change, right? Web 2.0 and all that user generated content stuff. But so far it’s only been in the first part, the content. what about the ads? We’re still expected to pay attention to any old crap that “they” want us to see or hear. (Or smell, in the case of many magazines!)
Google innovated by giving us more targeted but less annoying ads, but we still have no say in the matter.
Fred’s post today about favoriting ads got me thinking about it again. David Henderson and I talked about this when Digg ran a story on Digging Advertisements.
We now have ads created by users, which is a good start. But if we’re going to have this stuff in our face, we need have more choice about what’s going to be there.
I’m not sure what this will look like. I’m sure in will involve the phenomena of people endorsing ads, like when they friend the XBox user in MySpace. (As first pointed out to me.)
The value of my attention is rising, and I’m not going to give it to just anyone who pays a publisher!