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Like hitchhiking, days of making money with ads is dying

Dave Winer writes that as advertising gets more targeted, it ceases being advertising, it’s information. Read the whole post. Dave may be bashed by some of the young kids but you may be looking at the author of next summer’s bestseller which will be every bit as hot as The Long Tail is this summer.

Here’s some of the gems from Dave’s post. On ads on gmail he gets from realtors and mortgage brokers he’s doing business with:

So every time I get an email from one of these people, Google shows me ads for their competitors. …If I wanted information about competitors I know how to use the search engine, and I would go look them up (as I did when I was getting started).

And as to value of user generated content:

User-generated content is actually on the road to nirvana, but it’s not a sustainable model in itself. In all that content, which today’s companies view as frankfurter meat, undifferentiated slurry, a medium for unwanted hitch-hikers, is the idea for the next iPod, or the formula for peace in the Middle East, the campaign platform for the President we’ll elect in 2012, perhaps even a solution for global warming. You just have to believe that intelligence isn’t concentrated among the people who rose to the top of the 20th century’s ladders to believe that there are nuggets of wisdom waiting out there for the taking, among the minds that created all that UGC.

Dave may be from the tech industry, but lawyers and professional services businesses have much to gain by listening to him. I still get way too many calls about people wanting to advertise on their blogs. Lunacy. Read Dave’s post.

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