Social | Bangkok, Thailand | Aug 2005

Albert Wenger at USV:

There are good reasons to believe that structural change to smaller units and individuals will continue and offers opportunities for new marketplaces.

Marketplaces as organizations; exchanges instead of firms.

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In the near future, advertising will no longer be the default revenue model for web startups. To start:

• We will have realized that interruption-based “messaging” (e.g. corporate spam) is something nobody wants in our social networks, in our communication services, in our products and services, in our information sharing, in our transactions of value. We’ll be sharing too much value, too easily, too widely, too targeted: the transaction costs of advertising will simply be too high compared to other ways of extracting revenue from value creation.
• The interest will be in conscious consumption instead of conspicuous consumption. Attempting to convince consumers to “buy, use and discard more” simply won’t be good business strategy. Conscious consumption requires a different approach to influencing people’s decisions; existing traditional advertising is a square peg for that hole.