Search engines and social media platforms, really the digital revolution as a whole, have changed the face of advertising and marketing. Traditional methods of advertising seemed difficult to tie to metrics. How do you really know how many people saw that billboard and how could you possibly estimate how many people turned into paying customers? And were people sharing their experiences with others?
There's a number of questions that arise but a particularly interesting one is how much impact does "sharing" have on advertising? I think it's significant. As our lives are increasingly connected digitally, much of our social value is tied to connecting with friends and family over shared media. How many times have you sent a link to an article a friend would enjoy? How many times have you sent and Instagram post to a friend via direct message? My guess is multiple times per day.
It's these connections that have led many content producers to bring themselves out from behind a paywall. The New York Times, for example, was behind a paywall for a time. What did they discover? They were nearly unsearchable, as pages behind paywalls do not show up in google's search. Unwilling to completely abandon the subscriber model, they settled for a hybrid - people can access up to 5 articles per month, more if they access the article through social media. What they noticed is that people were unwilling to read an article if they could not share it with others. Content producers and advertisers should be quick to accept this changing landscape. If there was ever a debate about the proverbial tree in the forest, it seems like now its quite obvious that if it's not re-tweeted, it definitely never happened.
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