Quote from Harvard Business: Who Are Mass Media’s True Customers? - Peter Merholz - HarvardBusiness.org

If you don’t work in mass media, you might be forgiven if you think that you — the reader, the watcher, the audience member — are the customer. When you work in mass media, you know that readers, watchers, and audience members are really the products, being served up to mass media’s actual customers, the advertisers.

Learning From Craigslist: Who Are Mass Media’s True Customers? - Peter Merholz - HarvardBusiness.org

This is true, but given that the context of this quote is a discussion about Craigslist (specifically, Wired article about it) the big difference is that Craigslist does not make most of its money from advertising, while big media publishers do.

Therefore, at least in theory, Craigslist’s interests are aligned with that of the audience, while big publishers only align their interests with advertisers.

The reality is much more complex, because what advertisers have so far demanded from “mass media” is just a specific audience. Not an advertising product, an audience. And mass media optimized their model mostly around that — coming up with content that attracts a specific audience, leaving the rest of the work to ad agencies who in turn filled out native ad formats for any specific media channel. Those formats include things like 30 second spots on TV, highway billboards or full-page ads in newspapers.

It is VideoEgg’s Troy Young that coined the term “native ad format” (I think), but this really does explain quite a lot. All the other native ad formats work because they are conducive to the context in which that media is being consumed.

With digital media things are more complex in every possible way. People spend little time on any given page. There is no native ad format. There is no established way to reach a specific audience since search engines fragment audiences by keywords, making the groupings less relevant (ex. I can search for “tomato” and land on an auto site, this doesn’t qualify me as an 18-34 male with X income). And so on.

All this means that delivering advertisers the same thing, a specific, hopefully captive (”engaged”) audience, is harder than ever. I guess that’s something the author of this story and I can agree on.

(link via chartreuse, and I oh so wish Tumblr imported posts properly)