Weeknotes 1 - TV, ads, and business models

Reading Alice Bartlett’s Weaknotes is the highlight of my week. She makes writing look fun and easy, so I was wondering what it’s like to try something similar. Alice, you’re an inspiration. Anyway, here it goes.

Did you know that first online banner ads had a click-through rate of 78%? Twenty years later you can expect about 0.05%. This decline in effectiveness of online advertising continues, and if this paper from 2013 is right, this could spell trouble for the whole of the internet. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
On a long train journey, I binged on Ben Thompson’s writing about TV. This essay on the structure of the TV industry, and on what’s happening now that internet companies have arrived on the scene, is really good. It introduced me to this quote from Jim Barksdale:

“There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle.”
Turns out that millennials are killing watching TV, and Ben Thompson wrote in 2016 about what it means for TV advertising. It doesn’t look good.
At what point will you be able to buy a 4K smart TV for £100? The viewing data collected by smart TVs is already valuable enough to make them cheaper than non-smart TVs. Would you pay for an incognito mode on your TV, or for a premium TV that doesn’t collect any data in the first place?

Well, this was fun. See you next week?