From the Los Angeles Times
By Joel Stein
I am not buying enough stuff. I know this partly because President Obama keeps telling me that....
The balance between advertising and purchases is way out of whack. I must see 100 times as many ads each day as I did 10 years ago, but I spend half as much time buying stuff. The economy might have sunk because we were buying too much, but it also was because we can get away with buying so little....
When I ran my advertising/purchases imbalance theory by Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google and a UC Berkeley economics [and School of Information] professor, he agreed with me, noting that new successful companies are not ad-based. "It is interesting to note that the growth in the pay-per-view video model — DVDs, Home Box Office, premium cable channels, etc. — has far exceeded the growth in traditional, advertiser-supported networks in the last several years." It is also interesting to note that Varian not only doesn't do things for free, he has two employers.