Hasta La Creative!

Writer and scholar, Nicholas Carr, is having trouble concentrating.

So am I. Perhaps you are too.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I made myself read every word of Carr’s piece in The Atlantic. It wasn’t too difficult. However, knowing what to do with his argument is.

There are times when I want to close this machine and walk away. But that seems extreme. Even if I were to curtail all content production, would I not want to read several newspapers and magazine and maybe a few blogs online?

One obvious answer is to turn all disruptive applications off while reading. Although that’s far from perfect, given the cluttered, blinking, overly commercial nature of the sites I visit.

According to The Wall Street Journal, square pegs don’t fit into round holes.

Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News is close to scrapping the current format of its daily “World News” Webcast, an online version of the evening news anchored by Charles Gibson, which the network trumpeted as a major step into its digital future when it launched two years ago.

Network executives and media buyers say that broadcast news suffers online when it is based on the old news model of a strong and authoritative anchor, like Mr. Gibson, escorting viewers through the day’s news. Online news consumers want to click around, reading and watching only the stories that interest them.

In an animated discussion with Washington Post editors and reporters yesterday, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer offered his far-ranging views of upcoming changes in technology and the media. Here’s a slice:

Q. What is your outlook for the future of media?

A. In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

From the head of Zues Jones comes some thought provoking material regarding the web as a less than perfect storytelling medium.

There’s no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn’t really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it’s absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories.

The web isn’t just a communications medium, it is a medium for interacting with people. Storytelling is inherently one-way, in fact, the main use for stories in the history of humans has been to teach. Using the Web for teaching and one-way dissemination of information are a waste its talents.

As a writer who is attracted to the web like a moth to flame, I find this insightful and useful. In this format, I think of myself as a writer first and a conversationalist second. And that may be limiting what AdPulp can become, so I need to pause and consider what it all means.

Last week, Rob Walker puzzled what is so special about a service that gets people “talking” in micro-bursts.

I just can’t get worked up about Twitter either way. Why do people have such extreme reactions to it?

According to the theory above, people come to the web to talk, not read, view or listen passively. People want to engage by creating stories with others, as they would in real life. When one tells a story in real life, other people add to it in real time (which can be annoying to the storyteller). Twitter mirrors this, whereas a blog is more traditional in its storytelling structure. On a blog a writer offers something, then comments come in, but it’s not a conversation just like email is not a conversation. IM and Twitter are conversations; thus, the excitement around them.

Steve Rubel reminds us that there are millions of Americans missing out completely on the internet boom.

According to Ad Age, internet-ad revenue notched $21.2 billion in 2007, an annual growth rate of 26%.

That was good enough for the medium to top radio, which was expected, but the figure also puts internet ahead of cable’s $20.9 billion take.

“We’ve learned not to be surprised by the vitality and vibrancy of internet advertising,” said David Doty, senior VP-thought leadership and marketing at the IAB.

For some perspective, let’s compare these numbers not to other media channels, but to spending on the Iraq War. We spend $12 billion a month on that effort. The internet is big, but it’s not that big.

According to Valleywag, “prices in the online advertising’s world bargain bin are cratering.”

Owen Thomas of Valleywag writes:

The business of brokering ads is failing advertisers and publishers. Advertisers don’t want to spray their ads across the Web; they want to target them to the right audiences. Publishers, meanwhile, would like to see their products earning uninsulting rates. But what is sold cheaply is valued little.

Valleywag cites this PubMatic report, which claims that Web site monetization dropped by 23 percent in April.

Among the verticals, Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47 percent. Entertainment monetization dropped 17 percent. Gaming and Sports were down marginally (4 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Technology remained relatively flat, but is still off January highs.

Media Rights Capitol, a content company backed by WPP, Goldman Sachs and AT&T has purchased the Sunday night slot from ailing CW network, which is jointly owned by CBS Corp. and Time Warner.

The Wall Street Journal says, it’s “unusual” to sell a stake in a block of prime-time programming to an outside entity.

Prime-time viewership on major English-language broadcast networks is down 9.6%, to an average of 8.3 million viewers this season, according to Nielsen Media Research. The CW is having a particularly hard time. The network’s season-to-date viewership is down 22%. It has attracted an average of only 1.1 million prime-time viewers on Sunday nights, according to Nielsen.

By buying into the broadcast-TV business, MRC is betting it can profit in a world where two-thirds of new shows don’t survive. MRC and the CW are planning to book two comedies and two dramas in the Sunday slot but declined to say what they would be. MRC says it plans to shift the CW’s target audience on that night from 18-to-34-year-olds to an 18-to-49 focus.

For more on MRC, see this New York Times article from over a year ago.

Journalists Marc Glaser and William Bastone discuss Barstone’s site, The Smoking Gun and topics related, on NPR’s MediaShift site.

The Smoking Gun started 11 years ago as a side project for Village Voice organized-crime reporter William Bastone. It has since been sold to Time Warner, but its core mission and staff size hasn’t changed; it’s still three folks running the show, hunting down incriminating documents and digging up dirt.

One of the reasons I’m pointing to this interview is Bastone’s call for original reporting.

There are a lot of people commenting on stuff and riffing on things and blogging, but actually reporters breaking stories on the Net — there are a lot fewer than I would expect.

I get a kick out of the Gawkers and Defamers of the world, but how much of that is a news story, they broke a news story. It really isn’t. It’s a high profile site, but can you identify a story that they broke? If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have thought there would be a huge scrum for [breaking news online], and it may get to that point, but I don’t really see it.

This is something I think about regularly. I’d love to move to an original reporting format on AdPulp. The thing that prevents it (for now), is the fact that I already have an all consuming day job.

According to The New York Times marketers are looking increasingly to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites. Some networks offer targeted advertising; others, called vertical ad networks, include sites that focus on one subject, like travel or sports.

Imran Khan, an Internet analyst at JPMorgan Chase, estimates the top 20 ad networks earned $2 billion in 2007, or 14 percent of the $21.1 billion display market.

The reasons ad networks are thriving are price and improved technology. Ad networks charge much lower cost per thousand ads served (known as CPMs), as low as $4 on an ad network with some targeting, compared with $40 and up for some ads on premium sites like MSN or Yahoo.