A Week of Conferences (Part 4)

I was going to write lots of stuff about the Essential Mediatech conference. However, the day contained many inconclusive panel debates about the direction of the online advertising and television industries, none of which were particularly interesting.

The one thing that stood head and shoulders above the rest of the day for me was Reid Hoffman’s keynote speech – it was awesome. He proposed academic-style arguments about Consumer Internet businesses; and since he is the self-proclaimed world expert on Consumer Internet, I’m inclined to listen to pretty much everything he said (bar the odd LinkedIn plug!).

His main argument observed that the Internet advertising industry is so chaotic and evolving so fast at the moment that it is almost impossible to write down any meaningful plan or projection for the next 2-3 years. Therefore the most sensible thing for an early-stage business to do is put “revenue placeholders” down e.g. Google Ads in banner space, and then worry about the specific monetising channels if and only if you actually build a user-base of significant size. Selling direct advertising early on as a bootstrap may also be acceptable in some cases. Some might say this is Web 101, but given current advertising market conditions, with Facebook’s Beacon etc. it’s probably the most sensible thing for most early-stage businesses to revert to with their strategy.

You can watch a full video of the speech on Intruders.tv: Essential MediaTech Keynote: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn

Also, webstreams of every panel discussion from Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford are available here.