Well – Steve Rubel says much of what I have been thinking for some time – and it was mirrored in what was being said at Entrepreneur Week NYC recently – that advertising is not cutting it anymore – and most sites can’t count of making a living off of Advertising – and Steve says it best in The End of the Destination Web Era

In March the average American visited a mere 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What’s worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention.

The alternative is sharing online information that mentions brands specifically - or better yet – produce the information.  Most of the corporate managers will not be able to embrace this because it’s too much work – and would necessitate a restructuring of organizations and loosening of control they’re uncomfortable with, for many reasons, including legal ones.

Compared with banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers and sponsored links, articles that include brand information were most likely to lead US Internet users to read—and act.

In addition to making a product so compelling it demands coverage, this requires a more natural, PR-focused strategy of getting the word out. Or in some cases, tailoring ads so they look like articles.

How likely viewers were to take action depended slightly on demographic factors. About one-half of both men and women were likely or somewhat likely to respond to articles that have brand information included in them.

I haven’t said anything different than what Steve Rubel wrote – up to this point in the post – now I will.

Advertising doesn’t have to die - but it does need to radically change - to be targeted into the exact micro fragmented landscapes that have arisen with the democratization on content and online media.  What I’m advocating is to start treating online marketing much as Advertising was treated in Virtual Worlds (similar to vendors like Code4Software’s V-Tracker and AdSoft).  Here’s what I mean …..

AdSoft Network in SL – Ubiquitous placement all over SL landscape created opportunities for large audiences and customized targeting that created better results – contact Code4Software.com for more details.

What we’re seeing now is a micro fragmented landscape where people are beginning to create content, much as they did in Second Life when it was more popular, and consuming content – but in small packets, all over the landscape – with few readers (avatars) being present in any location at any time (due to technical limitations with the platform, mostly).  However, by being ubiquitous and with enough targeted advertising, in aggregate – you could still match results of much larger, mass marketed campaigns.  I think the tracking across sites – in the behavioral networks and Google‘s acquisition of DoubleClick along with the large amount of information collected by Google Analytics and data from AdWords/AdSense, makes the tracking possible – Yahoo and MSN also have a great deal of information, and when you put it all together, you can track across sites – more and more – and find micro-clusters this way.

When I worked at IBM I got involved in planning out Advertising Campaigns for the Virtual Business Center in Second Life- but they were never run, yet, the results from Caldwell Banker and The Red Cross, among other campaigns were impressive.   The virtual world situation mirrors what we’ve now entered into – the age where the destination isn’t that important any longer.  BTW, just want to disclose I am a stakeholder in Code4Software.com and do work with them on various projects.

And it’s the age where aggregating traffic in one place is no longer working – which means that media starts (ie: movie stars, for example) that command large payoffs for attracting large audiences – or sites that do the same thing – are becoming harder to justify.

After all, for one Julia Roberts that makes 20 million dollars a picture (to get millions of people to go and watch her – essentially repeat her what she does, act, over and over) there are thousands of people who could eck out a living doing things that are half as good, or even as good, and make 60K -80K a year – film makers, performers in user generated video.

Numb3rs – Trouble in Chinatown – Episode 13

Sure – as more people create content – attention is going all over the place – into this fragmented landscape – and where you could not get that many people to watch a blip.tv show than, say, Numb3rs, on Cable or CBS, you could, by targeting the online audience, in little clusters, on the sites where they go to consume and watch (each other) start making up for the loss advertising opportunities that in MSM that aren’t working so well, any longer – and also create revenues on Micro Payments that will eventually, create viable income for some of the better, more liked creators.

And even it Numb3rs case, as shown in the episode I embedded above – superior metrics are coming about through the promotion of advertising to clusters of people who’d watch video online in much the day they watched it on TV or Cable.   In fact, and I’m just seeing it – but what happened to Newspapers (becoming obsolete, for better or worse) is probably going to happen to cable networks down the line – unless they re-invent themselves now (just a guess) – as the landscape becomes even more fragmented, over time.

Look, it’s happening already – just in little pockets – but in 5 years – it will be everywhere.