The Media Revolution
February 6th, 2006
This week Adam Dell of Impact Venture Partners invited me to chat with his Columbia MBA class about the “Media Revolution” happening all around us. I got there a little early and got to see some of the material he was covering, and I was struck by his characterization of what’s happening in media as a revolution.
It was something of a moment of clarity for me. Perhaps it resonated because I’d just finished reading 1776 by David McCullough. The book chronicles the first year of the American Revolution, and it’s a particularly interesting piece of work. We’re used to reading stories about how wars were won. But this is a story about how an ideological battle was sustained in the face of impossible odds, to be won later. How an amateur army that was outnumbered, out gunned, out-trained and outmanned in every possible way managed to sustain a battle that should have been hopeless. What the American patriots did was survive a period in which they should have been annihilated. Then for an encore, they went on to win a most improbable victory. How? I’m no expert, but there are two things that jump out at me about the American Revolution.
- The revolutionaries had a different idea of what it meant to live on this earth and to be free. They had a fundamentally different ideology.
- The revolutionaries refused to fight by the rules which were the rules of engagement of a superior force.
Revolution is exactly the right word for what’s happening to media right now. Well, at least some of what’s happening in media.
The slugfest which is going on for dominance in search is only likely to get more violent as Microsoft enters the fray in earnest. It is certainly a spectacle. But it is not a revolution. Even Google’s impressive assault on Overture’s market position was not the revolution it is sometimes billed to have been. The battle over search today is a land war involving heavyweights slugging it out for market share. Google coming from nowhere to dominate Overture was a flanking attack powered by a superior monetization mousetrap. There are hundreds of examples of competition over territory, market share and dominance. It’s much harder to think of a true revolution.
So what then, makes a revolution? A revolution is a fight over ideology. It’s not about dominance as much as it is about a different world view, a different set of core values…a different vision.
There’s something we hear a lot of over here. It’s a composite quote, not attributable to any individual and not an exact quote. It goes something like; “Right Media is crazy to take on the status quo. They’re crazy to do it alone. They can’t swim across the ocean.”
I understand the logic behind it, but it only partly makes sense. We’re not taking on the big closed networks. We’re taking on their way of looking at the world. Our business is not competitive to them, but our world view is. We have a fundamentally different ideology than they do. In short, we think the market should be liquid and transparent, and more access to information will benefit the buyer, seller and value-adding intermediary who embrace an open marketplace for advertising. For more on this, see related articles here and here. The closed networks think the market should stay closed, giving an advantage to the strongest intermediaries. Google’s AdSense network would like nothing better than for market information to remain inside their proprietary systems. It favors their dominant market share. We’re not trying to take their market share away. We’re trying to change the market in which they get an unfair share today.
We’re also not alone. Today over 40 ad networks are using Yield Manager to open their networks to buyers and sellers and other intermediaries. Publishers and advertisers are buying in too. With the launch of our Symple (working name) product in Q2, thousands of smaller publishers will be able to take control over the sale of their inventory. The marketplace we enable consists of thousands of advertisers, and we’re rapidly approaching tens of thousands of publishers. If this is the beginning of a revolution, and many believe it is, it is not a Right Media revolution. This is a market revolution. While a lot of attention is being paid to Right Media as the enabler of this new and open methodology for buying and selling advertising, there are hundreds of companies participating. This is about hundreds of companies, representing thousands of people who have embraced a fundamentally different methodology for buying and selling…not Right Media standing alone.
Some would say this is splitting hairs, and regardless of whether we compete head on or indirectly, we’ll be in their sights. Maybe so, but we’re willing to take that chance, because they’ll be forced to compete on our ground, by our rules. What we must do is change the rules of competition, and then we can have a revolution. And that’s why we don’t have to swim across the ocean. The empire (or empires) will come to us, comfortable in their superior numbers, talent, wealth and market share. And when they get here, they’ll find that the rules of the game are different, and that the revolutionaries are not 100 or so idealists working at Right Media, but hundreds of companies representing thousands of buyers, sellers and intermediaries who believe in a better, fairer and more open way of doing business.
