Dave Lakhani has an interesting post on the future of marketing and mass communication in which he coorelates it with singularity.

So as I studied The Singularity it occurred to me that the answer to how do you get your message to the masses and have it be heard most likely won’t be answered by us, it is much more likely to be answered by the individuals collectively that we hope to communicate to. In fact, it is my belief that another form of singularity will occur, in which potential customers will become evermore sophisticated in their ability to filter and consolidate information. As they become more sophisticated, they create individual influence streams from which they get all of their information, information that is highly personalized and highly selected. Rather than trying to increase the number of people they follow they become increasingly selective about who they receive information from ultimately reducing the noise while becoming much more connected to the channel through which they receive information. RSS was the first glimpse and promise of the idea that you could consolidate the information that you wanted into one single feed. In social media FriendFeed is trying to do that. And overall web wide Twine is also trying to do it. But for most consumers they don’t go far enough.

Wired Magazine’s editor in chief Chris Anderson, wrote a new book entitled “The Future of a radical Price“, where he outlines the future of media content concerning pricing. And he does so with a suprisingly counterintuitive prediction.
 
It begins with this video, Disruption By Design. Aside from a disruption caused by shoddy cameramanship, (the person shooting this video needs to be fired immediately, seriously), he basically outlines a picture that disruptions are here to stay, they are our future whether we like them or not. So the only way to prepare for the disruptions, is to become the disruptive force, be the driver of disruptive change by creating disriptive technologies.
 
Chris goes on to state that small groups and individuals tend to be quicker at adapting to disruptions and creating new disruptive technologies than large corporations or governments. One can then conclude that the future to successful enterprises will be in their ability to shrink themselves down to the smallest group possible in order to handle disruptions while retaining their overall connectivity with the larger group.
 
I think this is already evident in the form of spinoff’s, incubators, idea labs and skunk works projects. This is a trend that will continue, and how comanies organize themsleves to deal with and respond to disruptions will be a large determing factor to their success.
 
In Chris’s new book “The Future of a Radical Price”, he outlines the biggest disruptive force to hit the media. And in fact, this disruption is already here and being dealt with by anyone doing business online. Even Rupert Murdoch gave his opinion on free versus paid media content. 
 
The premise outlined in Chris’s book states that as products go digital, their marginal costs goes to zero. “This is the law of gravity online” he says. “Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”
 
Pretty harsh disruptive force indeed. So how will businesses make money online with digital content? Chris outlines 4 methods:

1. The best model is a mix of free and paid.
2. You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere.
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site.
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better

These last 2 points come as a suprise, and almost counterintuitive to what most web enpreneures believe. What Chris is in fact saying is, don’t charge for all your most popular media content, that which is driving your traffic. That will drive your ad revenue.
 
The content you need to charge for, is the long tail niche content, the hard to find and obtain content. While it’s true that fewer people will be interested in that content, they will however be more willing to pay for it.
 
Anderson’s last book was “the Long Tail”, where he predicted that in media, “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”

Search queries has continued to grow, it is up 68% over the past 2 years. However, the number of paid clicks, clicks on ads contained within the search results,  has only grown 18% over the past two years. The graphs below show these two trends.

What accounts for sizeable gap between these two numbers? Why is growth in the volume of search queries outpacing the growth of paid ad clicks by a factor of more than 3x?
 
According to Gian Fulgoni of Comscore, the difference seems to reside in the fact that ad coverage has dropped from 64% to 54% of searches.
 
In other words, the percentage of search results pages that contain a paid ad has dropped from 64% to 54%. Why is that? Why has ad coverage declined?
 

 One hypothesis is that search engines have been improving the searcher experience and reducing the importance of less relevant advertisers. So, essentially, more relevant search results.
 
Backing up this theory, Gian looked into the rate at which searchers clicked on paid ads and found that the rate hasn’t changed at all over the past 2 years. 
 
But yet another theory according to Gian is as follows:

An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.