Your Web site has captured the eyeballs; so what? You need attention + intent
In the comments following this Portfolio story about Facebook’s new ad platform (is it legal?), SmartGuyStocks makes this statement:
But Wall Street and Silicon Valley get carried away thinking that every time you get eyeballs it’s worth zillions — not if people are averse to ads during certain activities. We are still in the first inning of the information age, but all these companies think they’ve already figured everything out.
Capturing an audience isn’t enough. Capturing a demographic isn’t enough.
You need to capture intent.
What are people doing on your site? Are they receptive to ads? Will they use them? Are they making buying decisions? Does your content create a measurable intent that is valuable to businesses?
The only way I’ve seen intent measured and captured well is by search engines because, well, people type their intent, or the best representation of it that we have, into a little box.
The problem: Content producers are in the business of harnessing people’s attention with non-commercial content and hoping their attention shifts to commercial content sitting in the same place.
Businesses buy that hope. But for how much longer? Why? What they want is a consumer with the highest likelihood of purchasing their product/service. They want someone with an intent to buy.
Search engines supply that customer. Service-oriented, niche Web sites (see many at eHub) provide that customer.
This indicates three trends:
- Journalism will become more of service business that provides content to whatever site needs it (local news or real estate articles for Zillow.com, for example)
- Advertisers must become more like journalists. In a world of nearly limitless information about your good or service, you don’t get people to make buying decisions by creating the coolest commercial; you win by providing the deepest, clearest and most useful information, and the tools to act upon it.
- The journalism business will stop battling to capture people’s attention, and start precisely serving attention wherever it goes — unless it can figure out how to capture intent as well as search engines.
