communication transaction would end there. The 2.0 model not only allows those “many others” to comment and add to the content posted by the publisher, but they — the audience — can also add original content themselves. By designing Web software that uses community input and interaction as its content, sites such as Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr created sophisticated warehouses of content — without creating any content at all. It is still creation, of course, but an upside-down model for creation when compared to the traditional methods anyone over 30 has grown up with. Google, meanwhile, changed the economics around advertising without ever hiring a sales rep and powered the business side of the equation for much of Web 2.0. Let’s take a closer look at each of these phenomena:
... sites such as You Tube created sophisticated warehouses of content — without creating any content at all.
Google needs no introduction to journalists thanks to its marvelous search engine. But the company didn’t make money off the millions of daily search queries until it launched AdSense in 2003. With this new program (inspired by an existing company called Overture), Google allowed community members to set the price for ads they could place on the site with a self-service application. An advertiser picks a keyword or search term and tells the system how much it will pay if a Google user clicks on its ads. When a user performs a search with that search term, the advertiser’s ad appears. If the user clicks on it, then Google charges the advertiser. To extend the scale of pay-per-click advertising, Google created a system so all content publishers could run the Google ads on their sites. So instead of search terms, the Google robots (computer programs that continually “crawl” the Web, indexing the content) scan the text
Google ads from Miami Herald Web site home page, Dec. 19, 2006.
27 Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive