It’s The Eyeballs Stupid

Ask an 18 year-old today if they read the newspaper and you generally get a laugh. Being 49, I recognize that laugh. It’s the same one I gave my parents when they wanted me to put water and a little dab of Bryl-cream on my hair and cut my hair above my ears back in the 1970’s. It was sooooo outdated.

You see, the newspaper world just doesn’t get it.  They think the same eyeballs that read a newspaper are going to read the same copy online.  What they’re unable to do is monetize effectively the online eyeballs.  That’s because they’re investment is still tied up in big buildings, huge printing presses, enormous staffs, cutting down millions of trees and spending millions on gas to get the newspapers to the people that are no longer reading them.

Pity.

Haven’t we seen this all before?  Remember the railroads.  The railroads are the classic study of how an industry has it all and loses it.  They failed to recognize they were in the transportation business goes the teachings of Business 101 in every college.  So, the airlines came in and took over the monetization of moving people from point A to point B. 

When Bill Gates and Steven Jobs were going door to door with their silly little operating systems, the IBM’s of the world laughed them out of the conference rooms.  Why?  Because America was built on manufacturing.   Appliances and machines and ships and tanks needed to be built.  Designing software was something for college geeks. 

Jobs and Gates looked at each other and said, “They don’t get it, do they?”  And countless billions of dollars in lost revenue later, the IBM’s of the world finally get it.  And Steven Jobs finds himself as CEO of Disney.

And now the newspaper world is selling ads in their newspapers and in the process you can get a banner or something like that on their respective websites.  Why?  Because they think the battle is about content.  It’s not.

Look at Myspace.com and Youtube.com.  Sure, there is lots of content there but the reason they exist is for connectivity.  What the newspaper world has failed to realize is that we are no longer in the Information Era.  We’re headlong into the Internet Era where Connectivity is King and content is measured by volume, not quantity.  Still don’t get it?  Look at anyone under 25’s emails.  Check their spelling.  If content is king, spelling would be queen.

There are lots of sites built on content.  Yahoo is indexing over 12 billion pages.  Type anything into Google and see how many matches you get.  That’s because we have too much information.  In the Information Era, information was king.  If you owned the Information you had power.

Now, thanks to the Internet, the first entity in the history of mankind not owned by anyone, information has lost it’s grip on power.  To gain power on the Internet, you need connectivity.  Once you achieve connectivity, you get eyeballs.  And even the newspaper world will tell you that the more eyeballs you get the more money you make.

It’s about eyeballs stupid and eyeballs will always equal cash.