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It seems that in the last several years, the only business case presented by companies is advertising.

• Search? Advertising.
• Blogs? Advertising.
• Calls? Advertising.
• Entertainment? Advertising.

Although advertising is a good monetization technique for some, it is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

Let me first split the markets into two specific types: hunters and gatherers. I am not talking about prehistoric human societies, but rather about the concept of what we do in different situations.

Gatherers

As gatherers, we’re collecting – usually information. Examples of this include searching or reading blogs.

When searching I am already on the lookout for something – searching for it, gathering information. When reading blogs, I am usually reading specific blogs and blog posts to gain insights about a given market.

In both these activities, we skim through information, usually not trying to concentrate and focus on anything in depth. Nicholas Carr has insights about this behavior over several posts in his blog.

This kind of an activity is quite suitable for advertising. As the user is already searching, why not provide him with relevant advertisements? He is not focused on anything specific thing after all.

Hunters

As hunters, we’re obsessed on a specific target.

Hunting is like calling – you cannot do it in parallel to other activities – you either talk to someone on the phone or do something else. Whenever I type on my computer and talk to my wife over the phone at the same time, she notices it immediately and I get reprimanded on the spot.

Entertainment is also a hunting activity. If you are watching a good movie at the cinema, you are bound to get annoyed at that nasty mobile call that someone receives in the most thrilling scene. It is no wonder that ABI research found out that people using IPTV are very likely to skip advertisements: “Nearly four of five TiVo customers and over 82% of service provider DVR customers indicated they skip all or most commercials”.

In entertainment today, the only possibility is degrading to silent advertising techniques. Now that we’ve gotten used to advertising in gathering scenarios (mainly searching), who wants to digress back to TV commercials?

For those thinking of monetizing through advertising, it is important to note that it fits a small set of large companies who provide the infrastructure. As Stacey Higginbotham from GigaOm explains:

“Application companies have some ad revenue, but right now they’re kind of like cable channels for the web, while an ad platform is the means to a business model that supports that cable channel.”

Companies need to search for other monetization techniques, especially in the entertainment and telephony markets. Advertising fits best to search, and even then, you’d rather be the ad platform and not the companies using it.