PPC Without Pity

I’m blogging live from SXSW Interactive today. It’s been a crazy ride so far, and we’ve still got two days to go. The buzzword of the conference seems to be social media. I almost feel like the lone voice of paid search here. While I agree that social media advertising is a significant force, I think it has a long way to go to be viable. For example, there doesn’t seem to be any way to reliably measure cost per conversion. Until they figure that out, I don’t think social media will be replacing PPC any time soon.

I did get some insight from Steven Johnson’s talk on the future of news. Johnson seems to think that laid-off newspaper journalists will be able to pay their bills by starting hyperlocal blogs and earning money from online ad revenue. He theorizes that advertising dollars from now-defunct newspapers will migrate to the web. While I agree with him on this point, I have my doubts that ad revenue from a blog with such a limited audience could generate enough AdSense revenue to pay the bills. It might be a good idea to brush up on content network strategy just in case, though.

That’s it for now. More updates later if something piques my interest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.