Kyle Morgan's Daily Deceit » Advertising

Airplane Internet: Could it to be Free of Advertising?

Kyle Morgan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:57:56 +0000

I recently read a blog article on Mashable that talked about airplane Internet coming soon, but turning into an advertising machine. In a previous article, I shared an opinion about social networks turning into an advertising media because of lack of business model.

First, I would like to clarify this concept of social media not having business model. I actually do believe that social media have a business model. And their business model is about the famous whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The extra value that comes out of the sum of its members is the business model. The problem in my opinion is that current business community does not recognize this value yet. What I mean is that while investors firmly believe that social media are valuable but that social media does not have as much income as it should. Think of Facebook that had negative cash flow while being valued at $4 billion. And where is their income coming from? Advertising!

Social media are forces to get income from advertising because business practices have not accepted the fact that the Internet has a tendency to minimize profits. For example, if you want to buy shoes from two stores that offer different prices, you might pick the one that is next to your home, even if its asking for more. But this is not the case for the Internet: all websites take the same traveling time and offer more or less the same conveniences! So what happens with time is that sale prices will tend towards cost prices, hence minimizing profits.

Now to come back to our airplane Internet issue, and most especially the advertising that will most likely come with it, if it is true that most business travelers will pickup an airline that offers Internet, then why not charge those travelers? Let’s imagine a world where the aggregation of all global traffic will set the value of a website, i.e. a website that has that much traffic has as much value. After all, Internet surfers who use free services still have to pay their ISPs, don’t they?

Now, if Internet becomes an advertising-based free service, what will happen to the value of social media’s? Its going to go down because there is less people clicking on advertising. This means that the whole concept of business value is changing on the Internet. We cannot just take old rules and apply them on the Internet because it won’t make sense. The Internet should have a different value model that is not based on the classical service exchange or barter principles. I say no to advertising on airplane Internet.

Bing as a Promotion Tool For Microsoft

Kyle Morgan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:20:51 +0000

It appears that Bing prioritizes pro-Microsoft pages, as search on Bing for the phrase, “Why is Windows so expensive?” returned “Why are Macs so expensive”. All would agree to say that this partiality is questionable and that it turns Bing into a platform for promotion more than a search engine.

Now when I first read the above blog post, I remembered right away that the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo was that Yahoo uses Bing search engine. As a result, pro-Microsoft content will be fed to Yahoo search engine users. From my opinion, this is just another way for Microsoft of taking over Yahoo. I don’t know what happens inside Yahoo for letting something like this go, but it all looks like major transformations are coming for the Sunnyvale guys.

So here is the picture: Microsoft wants to take over Yahoo, but it doesn’t happen. After rounds of negotiation, the deal is that Microsoft will license its new search engine to Yahoo. Now, we just find out that Bing is just an advertising platform. So what’s next? Well, Yahoo users should just switch to MSN. Why get exposed to second hand advertising. Let’s all go to the source!