In Advertising, Not Even the Paranoid Will Survive

The logical consequence of disintermediation is the extinction of advertising.

Yet do not confuse advertising with marketing: Since every company will be a media company, marketing products and services via the company’s own media channels will become much more significant.

Indeed, this is the plain and simple reason why Ebay was smart to acquire shopping.com, why Amazon was smart to acquire diapers.com, why NBCU was smart to acquire weather.com, why CBSi was smart to acquire the CNet portfolio of domain names, … — this list could go on and on.

Even Google wants to acquire domain names (in particular top-level domains). It will be interesting to see whether the United States Antitrust laws will be applied to Google in this regard, or whether the government of the United States will allow a company that is supposed to index domain names to also manage the domain names it is supposed to simply index.