He might not take this as a compliment, but I think Andrew Keen will be recognized as the Bill O’ Reilly of the Anti-Web 2.0 movement.
Love him or hate him, O’ Reilly accomplished something very important for the conservatives in this country: He defined the enemy. For a long time, many conservatives struggled to describe exactly who they had their disagreements with. Until O’ Reilly came along and defined the term Secular Progressive.
In his Change This manifesto, Keen, the author of “The Cult Of The Amateur,” does the same for the growing number of voices railing against the Web 2.0 movement. In his manifesto, he defines the digital utopians, who, according to Keen, believe that:
The mainstream media is an elite racket monopolized by privileged experts, which has failed (they believe) to reward real talent. Society is, consequently, full of unjustly published writers, unrecorded musicians, undistributed movie directors. Web 2.0’s technology, therefore, is emancipating. By becoming bloggers and podcasters, we — the traditional audience — become the empowered author. [Web 2.0] technology frees culture from the traditionally authoritative [media] institutions. So the “good guys” — the bloggers, remixers, and denizens of the virtual worlds — are uniting audience and author into something called ‘citizen media’.”
Keen warns, however, that the greatest casualty of this vision is the “disappearance of shared cultural understanding and experience. Conversation — one of the ideological fetishes of the Web 2.0 movement — is one of the first casualties. In a world of 70 million bloggers publishing 1.5 million blogs in the US every day, we are too busy broadcasting our opinion to have anything to say to each other.”
Keen is not alone in his critique of the Web 2.0 movement. John Dvorak of PC Magazine recently wrote:
Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results—a bust. The current bubble, called Bubble 2.0 to mock the Web 2.0 moniker, is harder to pin down insofar as a primary destructive theme is concerned. A number of unique initiatives, however, are in play here.”
Dvorak goes on to list a number of aspects of Web 2.0 that may contribute to its destruction, including “neo-social networking”, “mobile everything”, and user-generated content.
My take: Both Keen and Dvorak are wrong on certain counts, but raise valid points on others:
- Conversation not a casualty of the Web 2.0 movement. In fact, in terms of business-to-customer conversations, firms haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. What Web 2.0 has done, is given more people a way for their voice to be heard — even if nobody hears it, and even if that voice isn’t worth hearing (although that judgment would be a display of the same eliteness digital utopians are guilty of).
- And Dvorak (who I believe was intentionally fanning the flames by overstating the unanimity of the media in expecting a bust) is wrong to characterize the current Web 2.0 environment as a bubble. The dot-com era was a bubble in that the mania that overtook business pushed up stock prices to ridiculous levels. But current stock market prices aren’t buoyed by Web 2.0 fever. Hence, no Web 2.0 bubble.
But both men are right in identifying an irrational exuberance with the current and potential impact of Web 2.0. This irrationality is nothing new — generations have overstated, overpromised, and over-hoped for the impact of their particular social revolution going back to Marx (Karl, not Groucho).
My bet is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Web 2.0 will have significant impact on some aspects of how we interact from both a interpersonal and business perspective — but not all of the current Web 2.0 technologies will contribute equally. And it might take so long for those changes to take hold, that it will hardly seem like a revolution.
Most important, however, is that these guys represent what is becoming the Anti Web 2.0 movement — Keen in particular, with the publication of his book. And even if you don’t agree with them — and the other voices rising up in opposition to Web 2.0 — they’re worth listening to and considering. They learned something from the last bubble (and possibly even those previous to that). And you might learn something from that.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Andrew Keen, John Dvorak, Anti Web 2.0
Keen is one of the more strident ones, and while he makes some good points, they are directional rather than absolute, and he misses the positives.
All this talk of audience and authors magically merging into something is kind of like saying that web 2.0 turns everyone into a musician … but oops, I could not play the piano before web 2.0 so a bunch of new tools doesn’t change that for me.
However the real point (imho) is elimination of barriers to entry. Freely accessible tools change the dynamic for those who can play the piano, but do not eliminate the need for talent.
The problem many web 2.0 folks – especially the big ones like MySpace – will have is monetizing the model, just like “free home page” models before them. Any time “people become the media” they want to get paid for ads, not look at them.
Think about it. The more interactive you make the web app, the more it is about “me”, and ads are not about “me”, they are about “them”. So two things happen: you get really lousy results from the ads (this is already happening) and then the audience splits to the “new” version that is free but without ads.
Here’s another way to look at it: ask people if they would pay $10 a month to have a Facebook or MySpace account. None of the people I have asked, even heavy users, have said yes.
That means, in the end, that the app either really provides low value or the user is confident they can get the same utility elsewhere free.
That’s not to say certain niche segments won’t be successful advertising on MySpace or Facebook, but general advertising typically doesn’t work well in an environment where the audience hates the intrusion of advertising – no matter how smart the advertiser is. If the whole “revolution” is about being anti big media, then it’s not hard to understand why the audience hates advertising…
Jim, you make some great points. In at least one respect, then, the Web 2.0 movement DOES have something in common with the dot com boom. There was something I was fond of saying back then: “If all these dot coms are going to survive, then advertising will have to account for a larger percentage of the GNP than health care and financial services combined.”
Exactly. Not that they all go bust – hey, even Tripod is still alive – but the size and scale of them will eventually need to be rationalized.
YouTube might be a bit different, it can hide inside Google for some period of time and quitely become whatever. But I don’t really view YouTube as anything other than a place to post video, it’s not really a “social network” but an enabler of some functions of social networks. The reaction to the new YouTube video ads has been less than enthusiastic, as could be expected.
Over in the web analytics forum, people were fiddling around with valuation metrics based on what Google paid for YouTube. One number was $1,242.49 per visitor-hour, meaning for each 60 minutes of time a visitor spent at the site:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/webanalytics/message/12158
I don’t know what YouTube charges to play video ad spots to people that hate them, and they have other revenue streams, but last time I knew, banners in a mid-premium environment were selling for $30 / M or 3 cents each. That’s a heck of a lot of banners an hour to breakeven, if you know what I mean.
Think it’s possible to deliver 41,416 banner impressions to a single visitor in an hour? I’m sure someone will try…
I love this discussion… Let me start with notion of Anti-Web 2.0. It compares with the notion of being Anti-Toilet Paper. Users are going to use it and if someone is against it, well no one cares. I do agree that a problem with Web 2.0 is the cacophony of millions screaming at the top of their lungs to be heard. If you’re not bold or simply outrageous, no one will listen. So now we get a person who thinks, “Hey, no one has expressed an anti-2.0 position, I’ll be the first. He’s merely engaging in the same silly behavior.
Of course, the real discussion is where this is headed and if the attempts of marketers to monetize it will ever succeed. A recurring theme I do see is that the businesses that deliver the technology are making a bundle of money and the businesses that are attempting to use it to market their customer base are for the most part, experiencing moderate success. However, they will eventually learn from their mistakes and do it right.
Marketers need to realize the core concept that Web 2.0 is just another tool for viral or word-of-mouth marketing, which is a concept that dates back hundreds of years. The tools for viral marketing will forever change and the businesses that have a true understanding of their customers and prospects have a good chance to triumph.
[...] was an interesting discussion on Ron Shevlin’s blog on the Anti-Web. 2.0 Movement. It’s a ludicrous concept to rally against an unfortunate buzzword, but they do bring up some [...]