Sunday, June 12, 2005

The Ivory Tower Has Fallen....

Alas, my dear brethren, for it has finally happened. Yours truly has finally succumbed to the ploys of capitalism and prostituted himself out for the almighty dollar. No more can I be counted on the artistic roll call. What is he talking about, you may ask. AdSense. AdSense from Google is what I am talking about. Our fearless blogger has made preliminary preparations to begin placing advertisement on this blogspace. It truly is a sad sad day. But life in this imperialist, capitalist, dog eat dog first world nation is expensive! Thus the starving artist caves to herculean pressure to join in and make a buck. Its not that I advocate working for nothing, just that it seems that content increasingly makes way for marketing these days. For example, did you know that the average 30 min local news program actually contains only 7 mins of news? The rest is advertising. We've seen this happen to print, TV, and now, the internet. So much for the free flow of information. In America, we're not happy unless we can make a buck.

3 Comments:

At 11:35 PM, Blogger Codesuidae said...

Ads? On television? What is this you speak of? Oh, you must mean those boring parts that I skip with the fast forward button on my remote.

I have quite a lot of respect for people in the entertainment industry who command absurd fees for their services. If I, and I suspect most anyone, were able to do what those people do, and happened to be in the right place at the right time to do so, I'd certainly take my place under that waterfall of money, with pockets pulled wide open.

Societies pull themselves forward as resources and populations allow. Industrial nations are not built overnight. So-called third-world nations are progressing even now, projections estimate that most of them will be stabilized with an industrial status in around 50 years. Considering that we're talking about several billion people, that is an incredibly short timeframe (this is, incidentally, also about the time world population should stabilize at around 9 billion of us great apes. Provided we don't crash the ecosystem in the process).

Now, why do these entertainers make so darn much? Its partially because of two things. First, we humans have a limited capacity to recognize people in social groups. Capacity varies, but some research indicates that about 100 people is the typical upper limit on an individuals capacity to recognize and closely identify with other individuals. So including family and friends and coworkers, we've got a limited amount of resources for building an affinity with others. Factor two is that we've only got a relatively small community of people making and releasing big media. They control the market, and as long as they have enough stars to saturate the market than can reach, they have no incentive to make more stars. So, because of our biology we only want to see a limited number of people regularly, and there is no financial reason for the big media companies to wrangle more stars, so what you end up with is a potential market for maybe a few thousand really famous people. Since those people are serving a community of a couple hundred million, you end up with huge salaries.

Enter internet peer to peer media distribution, digital film and cheap, high quality post-production tools on home computers. The big media companies don't publically acknowledge it yet, but the end of their reign is nearing. Anybody with a few thousand bucks can make a great movie. As more independent material becomes available we'll start seeing more distribution channels for it, and along with it, the rise of small stars local to regions, social strattas, or sub-generas. There will always be the big stars with wide appeal in the major catagories though.

Anyway, the point is, don't worry too much about people living in poverty. While its P.C. to do so, there are big movers and shakers in society that have set in motion the changes that are necessary to fix most of those problems.

And back to the original topic, context sensitive ad links aren't evil, or even immoral. Heck, they are barely worth a good eyebrow raise. So good luck with it, perhaps you can post some status updates with the success of the attempt.

 
At 11:02 AM, Blogger Doris said...

I have to say, are the few cents or dollars worth the intrusion on your blog? Why succumb when it is your choice?

Sorry, you have thought this all through, but I am still at the stage of just not understanding why when the recompence is so small unless you have mega visitor numbers with happy clickers.

 
At 10:44 AM, Blogger Kyle Vernon said...

Doris-- I agree with you. Its not really worth the intrusion. However, I did want to see if it might be able to bring in a bit o cash as an experiment, but so far, it hasn't. So, I may be removing the ads in the not too distant future

 

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