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But wait, there's more:When you started using all the new technology to watch shows on your own terms, and to stop viewing commercials, you threw into question the modus operandi of a roughly $70 billion industry that has been remarkably stable for decades. The billions give television the room to maintain business as usual in the middle of this change-tsunami in a way that, say, newspapers can't. But some sort of reckoning seems inevitable.
In the not-too-long run, network television could come to look nothing like it does today. Maybe you will be surfing apps instead of channels, as the Apple chief executive Tim Cook predicts, skipping between shows that don't have commercial breaks or hard-and-fast 30- and 60-minute time limits. That would have big consequences for those who have stuff to sell and who still view television ads as the best way to do it — and equally big consequences for traditional television's gatekeepers.
In the short term, as in this coming week of television brinkmanship, bets on where it will all end up, and how much of a reckoning is already upon us, will drive the negotiations for what could be more than $9 billion in advance advertising purchases for the coming fall season.
The opening move came from Magna Global, one of the biggest ad-buying firms in the world, which told The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago that it was shifting $250 million of its clients' ad dollars to YouTube from traditional television.
That's a fraction of the many billions Magna spends on television every year for clients that include Coca-Cola and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. But it was a large enough diversion of television dollars to digital media to be of real symbolic importance. Magna pointed to declines in old-fashioned television viewing among those between the ages of 18 and 49, who are important to advertisers. "What we are trying to do is signal to the market that it is not business as usual," David Cohen, the United States president of Magna Global, told me last week. "Consumers have over the past several years been migrating away from linear television, and we need to acknowledge that."
Network television executives saw the announcement as something else: a savvy negotiating ploy just as the upfronts were to begin. They could point to motive.
(Score: 1) by ankh on Wednesday May 18 2016, @05:04AM
The Google and other search folks got their notion of the Internet hooked up backwards -- there's the problem.
It was supposed to offer _us_ access to information and enable us to search for, well, anything -- and refine our searches, and get better information. Better ideas. Better reviews. Better reports.
Less lies and less crap.
And Google should have been working assiduously with advertisers to help them get really good accurate helpful information wrung out about their stuff -- and third party reviews and users' opinions -- to get the world described well for search so we could search for, well, whatever we might want.
Same outcome -- manufacturers and sellers pay for the advertising, Google searches the advertising material according to the criteria we come up with iteratively to help us locate, well, anything.
Instead they got the polarity refersed somehow and enabled all the manufacturers and sellers to find_us_ and try to stuff crap down our throats.
No wonder people block ads, y'know?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 18 2016, @03:08PM
You got that about right. Let me add a detail to your description.
If I go online right now and search for an item, I'll get "the whole web" by default. I click "shopping", and it switches over to vendors offering that item. Top hits will be "sponsored advertisers", most of who are charging top dollar for their wares. I'll click something on that first page, whether it be Amazon, or Northern Supply, or whatever, just to get an idea what "top dollar" actually is. Then, I'll hit Ebay and do the same search. I find what the item sells for "new", "used", "refurbished" and etc. Then, I'll drill down through that first search to find what vendors might be matching Ebay. Sometimes I find that item selling new at the same price as "used" on Ebay, often times no vendor can match even the "new" prices on ebay.
At this point, I make note of model numbers, accessories, or whatever else I can find to compare. Then I search out consumer reviews on the item. Sometimes I feel the need to search out and compare specs between different brands and models.
As you point out, the internet should be supplying me with all this data, by default. Everything is computerized, for God's sake. Google KNOWS by now (despite attempts on my part to block their data gathering) that Runaway1956 is searching for high quality at low price. He'll settle for medium quality at moderate prices, but he is actually searching for high quality and low price.
Why don't they just give me that data, prearranged, in order from "prices I can't possibly touch", right on down to "you're wasting money on a piece of crap". Since they want to offer "personalized advertising", why not personalize it in such a manner that it actually saves me time?
Google is sophisticated enough to highlight the half dozen items for me that I'm MOST LIKELY to purchase.
So, why do I have to spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 days, sorting through all that data? (No, Runaway ain't smart enough to set up his own automated filtering engine, don't even ask . . . )
Naturally, other people have different search parameters. Some people believe "you get what you pay for", and they look for those high prices. Other people are so damned poor, they don't even try to search for quality - anything that works, even if it's disposable, is "good enough". Yet other people will pay any price for "bling" factor. Google knows who all of those people are - they can also make THEIR searches easier.
So, yeah, you're right - the internet has a lot of suck to it, because the polarity is reversed.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.