Bad News for the Valley and Media (Ok, Worse News)

Henry Blodget has a frightening-- but I think right on-- post about display advertising online. His take: Wake up! It's going down. Why? The economy, yes. But more important, I don't think display advertising has yet managed to make itself an indispensable part of the ad mix the way paid search has.

There's a debate subtly raging about whether we've really nailed display advertising on the Web to date. Some people, Henry included, say "Duh, it works." But "it works" isn't the same thing as having nailed a new and unique method of advertising consummate with the uniqueness of content and audience on the Web. Online should be something different, the same way print publications should be doing more than just putting the same words on a digital page. Floating ads? Pop-up? Pop-unders? Roll overs? Isn't it all just a quick gimmick until we find ways to block it? I can't remember a time I clicked on a banner ad and those automatically loading video and audio ads just enrage me to the point I don't have a positive brand-association.

Anecdotally, I keep hearing about no-brainer opportunities for brand advertising online to unique, highly desirable, mass demographics that are not selling. Not even at comparatively cheap rates! (It's all been off the record, so I can't cite examples. It's off the record for obvious reasons as blabbing about it doesn't exactly help the selling process.) This says one of three things to me:

• There is a lack of qualified ad sales people working in the online space
• Advertisers don't yet value this market
• To quote LOLcats: UR DOING IT WRONG INTERNETZ!

Yes, I realize display advertising is a multi-billion industry and it's sustained sites like Yahoo-- my part-time employer-- not to mention offered a new revenue stream for dying print media (albeit an apparently anemic one). But if you consider the demographics and time spent on a lot of these sites there's clearly money being left on the table.

It's not too crazy to draw an analogy to Facebook's situation. (Bear with me, here.) Facebook is generating hundreds of millions in revenue this year. Clearly Facebook has ad inventory people want. But Facebook considers itself in the first inning of figuring out a must-have revenue answer for its unique inventory.

In short, for years now proponents of display advertising have been saying-- and blindly believing-- it's all growth until the percentage of time spent online catches up to the percentage of the ad budget spent online. Maybe we need to assume there's a deeper problem and the hungry company that wants to survive needs to work harder to fix it.

"Ommmmm..."

That kept getting chanted around TechTicker headquarters yesterday morning. No, we weren't particularly into meditation, although you'd think looking at Yahoo's stock lately, Mr. Yang would offer some new zen program for all those stock-laden employees. (Bonus Prize: One-thousand of you may be also getting pink slips soon!)

Rather, Om Malik was our guest. Remember when the early GigaOm tagline had something to do with "...just close your eyes and say 'Ommmmm'"? That was, of course, back in the day when blogging was Om's sideline job, not his empire in the making.

He's so busy that yesterday was Om's TechTicker debut, and even though he was late to the nice SF studio we booked him so he could avoid a 50 minute drive to Sunnyvale, he was a lovely guest. I look forward to having him back soon! One reason I like Om? He has strong opinions and doesn't mince words. He gets slightly more rabid as these clips go on too. Enjoy!

Om and I on Gartner's strangely rosy IT spending projections:

Om and I on why newspapers are now losing money ONLINE too:

Om and I on Jeff Bezos, aka the new Steve Jobs/Bill Gates (I gotta say, Om is right here and WTF Seattle gets ANOTHER one? Step it up, Valley!)

Om and I on, well, GigaOm and all that funding amid an ad crisis [UPDATE: THERE'S AN EMBED CODE PROBLEM HERE THAT'S PULLING THE WRONG CLIP. WILL POST THE RIGHT ONE ONCE IT'S SORTED. SHAME BECAUSE IT WAS MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR!]:

Um, Gym Time Anyone?

I went on Flickr to find a picture of me giving a keynote for the speaker tab I'm about to add to the blog. (Yes, having conquered all that keynote angst, I am for hire!) Apparently, I've never searched my name on Flickr and was stunned to see so many pictures from the book tour that I'd never seen. It was actually a nice walk down memory lane. We're so nostalgic, Olivia is going to pull a few for a post later today.

I also came across this one by Thomas Hawk and suddenly, viscerally remembered how much MORE I worked and stressed out when I was on staff at BusinessWeek. This was right after my Digg cover that sucked up six grueling months of my life--including weekends and evenings-- and almost didn't even run. When it did run, it was my first big controversy, and I had no idea how to handle it. All I wanted to do was hide under a bed. It was just before the book deal that changed my life. It was a period when I wasn't eating (clearly!) or sleeping and actually started running to stay sane. I was barely in my 30s, depressed about the state of magazines and trying to figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my career. I honestly didn't know if I could even be a reporter still and be happy or if all those jobs were just gone.

It reminded me of Jason's now much written about (and somewhat mocked) Startup Depression post. This was my period where my ass was getting kicked-- the point when it was, as he says and the awful cliche goes, darkest before the dawn. It was the time I could have just given up and, I don't know, gone into PR or had some babies. (Stop laughing, Olivia.) There was no way for me to know how much my life would change in just two years. I should remember this time every time I feel overworked, because I'm really amazingly lucky. (Or maybe good...? Groan, sorry.) I don't know many reporters who have as great of a life as I do right now.

Also, um, I know it's a wide angle lens and an artsy shot, but I don't remember ever being that skinny!
I'm going to the gym now. (Such a girl, I know.) After the gym, less sap. Really.

How Can Print Not Get It?

This is pretty alarming. Jeff Jarvis said most of it here. Basically the Philadelphia Inquirer has now issued an executive order for all staffers to jump in their Deloreans and go back a few decades. If there's a sudden run on Deloreans, staffers are ordered to stick their heads in the sand. From the memo:

"Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won't post those stories online until they're in print. We'll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we'll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson."

Memo to the Inquirer: Those aren't blogs. Blogs are vehicles for emerging stories and a direct line from a reporter to an audience-- no editors in between. The best bloggers are efficient at breaking news because they throw things out there and use the responses they get to dig further. Many of my best stories evolve from a blog post or the comments I get on one. Blogs aren't dumping grounds for news that's not important enough for the paper, nor are they your vehicle to simply promote stories from the paper. As Ted Stevens says: "The Internet is NOT a dump truck."

Jarvis advised that Inquirer staffers "get out now." Yeah, cause it's that easy?

MY NAME IS SARAH LACY AND I HAVE AN ASSISTANT.

Geoff and I have been giggling about this all morning because it's just so indicative of my life right now. About a month ago, I Twittered (and talked about to anyone who would listen) about how happy I was when I hired a personal assistant, prompting Valleywag to gently mock me in a post even called, "Now We Can Breathe: Sarah Lacy Has Found an Assistant." Now, today, this site is "calling me out" for not calling her an assistant as if it's some nefarious plot. Um, I guess the Internet wasn't a big enough forum?  LOL

Save the Assistants? Meet Google.

(BTW, I'm only teasing the site. I'm glad someone is looking out for assistants everywhere!)

Quite Different from Playboy and almost as Suprising

Another list I'm on today: NowPublic's tally of the Web's 50 Most Influential People in Silicon Valley. I'm a respectable #35. Thanks for the props guys!

But more to the point: It struck me how few "traditional" journalists are on this list. I can count them on one hand. Obviously, a group focused on "crowd powered media" is probably going to weigh things differently than if, say, a consortium of newspapers was coming up with it. Still, it pretty much sums up the two sides of the media business right now: There's a ton of pain on the traditional print side as people still grapple with the best ways to be relevant online BUT if you embrace it, iterate, experiment there's a ton of opportunity amid the chaos.

I know I wrote something critical this morning about the blog-induced 20-second hype cycle, but all things considered, I think it's a great sign of the media industry's health that so many new voices-- and new types of voices-- have become so relevant and influential so fast.

Although, as I was discussing this with my BW editor Tom Giles today, (Sorry! You didn't say off the record! ;) ) he noted that individual brands are very hard to sustain, not to mention scale. After all few of us have the energy of Robert Scoble, who may secretly have clones or twins running around with all that video equipment. Tom is right. That's why I try to have the best of both worlds: I work for myself, but heavily contract out to two strong brands in Yahoo and BusinessWeek. We'll see how long I can stay relevant!

Really: Is it Cuil or Us?

Pretty harsh post on TechCrunch this morning about how Cuil "blew" it's launch in 20 seconds. It talks about the absurdly short hype-cycle of less than a minute on today's Web.

I'll be the first to say I was disappointed in the early results of a company that a lot of people I respect think very highly of. And I, too, was a bit stunned after raising that much cash and working so hard, they would launch now. And they should have kept their messaging to indexing more cheaply, the UI and privacy-- not touting greater relevancy, obviously. (We didn't even mention that one in our TT piece, because I hadn't gotten enough time to play with it.)

So yeah, they screwed some things up. But doesn't part of the blame go to the blogosphere? I'm counting me in that too. I was probably too effusive. Like everyone else in the Valley, I find technology and new companies exciting and Cuil has a great story. But you don't make up for that by then eviscerating a company. It doesn't somehow balance out in the greater cosmic order. TechCrunch says the whole thing was Cuil's fault because they didn't let pre-briefed bloggers use the service. Ok, that was dumb, but take some responsibility! No one forced you to write a glowing piece before you'd used the site. If I erred in being too excited about Cuil, that was my bad as a reporter, not the company's. (For the record, I seem to be the only blogger in the land who didn't get a pre-brief, I had just heard a lot about the company from sources for more than a year so I'd been anxious to check it out for some time.)

At some point, the tech blogosphere has to break itself from the junky-like addiction of having to get a story two seconds before the competitor. Can it really drive that much traffic when every other blogger got the same pre-brief? Isn't it better to wait a bit, use the service and write something smarter?

If we've got a 20-second hype cycle in the Valley, that's not Cuil's fault. And I don't think it's serving readers well either. If we write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon, does anyone looking to tech blogs for analysis keep coming back?

I, for one, am not writing the company off after one day. Launches are hard. How many of the products we use and rely on today were perfect the day they launched? I've invited the founders to come on TechTicker and hope they accept. I'd love to hear their thoughts on why the launch day went the way it did and whether they're worried about the backlash or just chalk it up to the increasingly schizophrenic blogosphere.

What's Up, Bitches?

That's what I jokingly titled my column I just filed for BusinessWeek. (Late, again.) The column was about women in Silicon Valley, a topic my very benevolent, smart and good looking BW overlords asked me to tackle. (Can you tell I'm trying not to get fired for so many late columns?)

My first reaction was "Sure, I can write that in my sleep!" But it wound up being incredibly hard. For one thing, I think the position of women in the Valley is really at a crossroads and I wasn't initially sure how to wrap my head around a lot of conflicting data points. And contrary to popular opinion we don't all move in lock-step making sweeping generalizations pretty hard. Anyway, read the column later this week to see how I sorted it all out.

A woman's place in this industry has been heavy on my mind lately. First, there was that whole Playboy thing that so many people freaked out about, then this odd occurrence at the TechCrunch party (more funny in its textbook "what-you-don't-say" quality than truly offensive) and the most recent visit to the Valley from the girl no one can agree on: Miss Julia Allison. As you know from reading this blog, I like Julia. Is she any kind of serious tech or business journalist? No. But she's not trying to be. After having many a late night conversation with her about business and brand, I can say she's not just a fluke or a pretty face or a girl who had her career bestowed upon her by Nick Denton's magic wand. She's a savvy business woman and she's learned a lot in the last few years. I had her come by TechTicker to share her thoughts on why companies shouldn't be afraid to brand employees. Believe it or not, it's not too different from the advice Charlene Li gives companies in Groundswell. Clip below:

I get a lot of grief for being friends with Julia. But you know what? People also probably get grief for being friends with me. If there's one thing I've learned from my life on the Internet it's not to believe everything you read about people, but to meet them and judge for yourself.

Princess Leia Returns...

I was thrilled to find my black "thank God I don't have to fix my bangs today" headband hiding in a random drawer this morning. I hope to find many other lost items during our upcoming move. (Just over to the Mission-- you're not done with me, Silicon Valley!)

Here's a segment I did on the advertising numbers. Actually looking for someone to interview tomorrow about specific online ad business models if someone has a suggestion. My usual peeps can't make it.

What's in a Mogul?

Yes, I am alive. And I apologize for the radio silence. I was at All Things Digital last week and it was a lot of schmoozing until the wee hours of the morning combined with running around being all on-camera-reporter-y during the day. (I've been mulling a post on my love-hate relationship with the whole on camera thing, and if I'd written it, I'd link to it now to explain why the whole medium is endlessly more time-consuming and frustrating than just being a print reporter, even as it is also more rewarding. One day.)

At the end of the trip my boss's boss, Neeraj Khemlani, asked me to write a big think piece about D for Yahoo. A take-away about all the endless hallway chatter and late night conversations. It was a testament to D that most of it was actually about the conference program, but rather than discussing what the various high-powered keynoters were saying, it was more about the way they said it. It was like we were groupies talking about lead singers and Hollywood starlets.

As Neeraj and I talked about our impressions, I started to get an entirely new understanding on what it means to be a "mogul," which became the subject of my very, very long piece which you can read here.