Economic and Business Model Transformation in Emerging Media

Attending a recent residency in Colorado Springs my Cohort and I had a brief discussion on a company that allowed you to develop an IPhone app for free. I did a quick search on Google for, "develop iPhone app for free" which resulted in over 98,000 hits. Now obviously these 98,000 are not sites that will allow you to develop iPhone apps for free but it does give an example of how relevant the discussion is.

Two examples of how technical and economic transformations are allowing new emerging media practices possible is the fact that you don't need $100 million dollars in Venture Capital to launch these new emerging media platforms. Whether developing a slick iPhone app or launching a new social networking site, you don't need a lot of money or a degree in C programming to develop these emerging media technologies. Open source, developer’s communities and the idea of FREE (read: Chris Anderson's book Free - How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit By Giving Something For Nothing), make it all possible.

Remember 11 years ago when we had the so-called "internet bubble,” a situation where every internet start-up imaginable was getting VC funding to develop the latest and greatest social website (I remember seeing a commercial during the Super Bowl during this time about a social networking site for dogs – I don’t think it made it). Back then you needed millions to develop these sites because the industry wasn’t as open as it is today and you needed a small army of outsourced developers over seas to develop it. With Open Source and Free economic business models you see today, one can develop emerging media with little to no cost. It is up to the users on how successful it is.

My iPhone example is not the only one. Today you can develop a blog site using WordPress, or you can create a social website / social networking site using Joomla or Drupal. All of these are examples of Open Source development communities where you can download the platform for free and use their developer’s community for any expertise you need to develop. With as little as $100 dollars for a hosting fee and leveraging free website templates you can develop a very attractive website for less than a few hundred dollars and if it doesn’t take off you don’t have to explain why your internet start-up is not profitable to a bunch of Stanford thirty-something’s in Palo Alto.

Open Source platforms and the idea of “Free” business models are two very interesting technical and economic transformations that have taken shape of the past several years to drive forward emerging media.

Evan Escobedo

The Wild Wild West of Online Advertsing

Security expert Benjamin Edelman discusses the latest online advertising techniques used by legitimate and not-so legitimate advertisers – bottom line, it is all about the mighty dollar.  In the book Beautiful Security (Oram and Viega, 2009) chapter six titled, Securing Online Advertising: Rustlers and Sheriffs in the New Wild West, Edelman states that, “Online advertising remains the Wild West where users are faced with ads they ought not to believe and where overpay for ads without getting what they were promised in return.” Edelman goes on to say that as advertisers get more and more sophisticated, they are less likely to accept services by ad agencies that they cannot confirm they actually did receive. (p. 105)

Edelman goes in to some detail about how ultimately the end users are the ones most vulnerable of these advertising attacks. A typical user cannot identify what is a legitimate ad and a deceptive one that can execute harmful computer exploits that can take total control of ones computer. Says Edelman, “Later in 2004, British IT news site The Register was hit by an exploit that installed malware on users’ computers, showed pop-ups, tracked users behavior in great detail, and even converted users’ computers into spam-spewing zombies.” (p. 91)

Even familiar and respected sites are not entirely safe. As the FTC tries to combat this with litigation citing “nonconsensual installations” which says that ones computer is private property and are a “trespass to chattels.”

Talking about advertising itself, Edelman goes on to discuss Malvertisments and Deceptive Advertisements in the chapter. Regarding Malvertisements, Edelman suggests that, “Unlucky users sometimes encounter banner ads that literally pop out of a web page. In some respects these ads look similar to pop ups, opening a new web browser in addition to the browser the user already opened.” However these ads pop open without the underlying website knowing or authorizing it. (p. 92)

The author also discusses the idea of Deceptive Advertising where advertisers use misleading ads like eye catching survey questions (Do you like George W. Bush) or false claims (Get free ring tones). And when one clicks on these deceptive ads it takes one to a completely different website all together.

As Edelman refers to this online advertising environment as the Wild West where advertisers, brokers and users try to uncover profit models while remaining secure, Edelman sums it all up when he states, “online advertising economy offers exciting opportunities for those with interdisciplinary interests, combining the creativity of a software engineer with the nose-to-the-ground determination of a detective and the public-spiritedness of a civil servant. Do well by doing good – catching bad guys in the process!”