Rapid changes in the advertising industry

In many ways the mass communcations platforms of the modern world are monetized in one primary way: Advertising. While the business world has tried repeatedly to figure out how to squeeze every last dollar, euro or pound out of every bit of information that comes or goes, it's been the advertising industry that's seemingly always ahead of the curve, finding ways to integrate their products into everything from public radio to, of course, personal websites.

However, in the era of new media that is all changing. Yes, if you sign up for a google blogger account, you'll have the option of monetizing it - allowing ads to appear on your blog and getting a certain amout of money for each page view. But other than that, the advertising industry hasn't really been able to crack the egg of profiting off the internet and other new media sources in general.

You can't advertise a Tweet. Twitter itself is totally ad-free at the moment (which makes one wonder how it's valued at nine figures... haven't we learned enough over the past year about the high cost of speculation? But I digress...) This is deadly to the advertising industry because so many people are using twitter for personal reasons, but also to pick up on news feeds and stay current on events.

Same with text messages - how do you advertise when people are texting individually to each other? The advertising industry, so long ahead of the game, are now playing catch-up and no one seems to have any idea what the next step is for them.

You can smell the panic here in New York, where the advertising industry's upcoming meltdown will have far-ranging effects. New York got rid of their light industrial base in the 1970s, and since then has moved progressively towards an economy based upon the financial world, the advertising industry and the service sector. There's upper middle class, there's working class, but the middle class itself has vanished.

Well, the upper middle class is vanishing now, too. We all know what's happened over the past year with the financial sector. People who were making $250k a year are now pushing mops - assuming they can find one to push - for one tenth that amount. Each one of those jobs in the financial sector supported four service jobs - restaurants, cabbies, bus drives, even cops and firefighters. Well, the same can be said for the advertising industry. AS those jobs dry up, it will have a wider and wider ranging effect on the economy of New York City as a whole.