When Andrew Keen released his first book, The Cult of the Amateur, in 2007, he was taken to task for his critical stance of the web. In his own words, Keen was “vilified as an elitist, someone totally out of touch.”
Eight years later, Keen said his chorus of critics has quieted. In the lead up to the release of his latest book, The Internet Is Not The Answer, published earlier this month, Keen said he’s seen the zeitgeist shift, with more people becoming skeptical of the web.
He’ll tackle that topic and plenty more during an opening lunch Jan. 26, as part of FFWD Advertising and Marketing Week in Toronto. Ahead of the talk, Marketing spoke to Keen about data collection, the cost of content and how web companies market themselves as forces for good.
Here’s five takeaways about the current state of the web.
Data is the subsidy of free
Consumers are starting to understand their data is the trade off for free web content and services. Early on, consumers only understood how sites like Google and Facebook track them in the abstract – if at all. As web literacy increases and privacy becomes a more prevalent issue, Keen said consumers are realizing they pay for what’s “free” online with their data.
“I think consumers are waking up,” Keen said. “People [now] realize we live in an eerie world where unnamed companies and forces know more and more about us.”
Consumers need to take more responsibility on the web
Consumers can’t have everything, Keen said. They can either have content and services that they pay for, or ones that track them.
“Consumers have to understand that not everything can exist for them, that they need to have responsibilities as well. If they want to protect their data, then they need to shop around online for different services, and probably need to pay for them,” Keen said.
Content needs to be paid for
In Keen’s opinion, advertising isn’t enough for the content business to survive on. The web, he said, is too reliant on advertising and on the TV-era system of free content monetized through the sale of ads.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t have large, successful companies built on advertising,” Keen said. “But those models come with deep, troubling compromise of big data.”
Because of this, he said, advertising “is increasingly bound up in transforming the consumer into the product itself.”
There’s a dark side to disruption
As a culture, we’ve fetishized the idea of disruption. Startups are celebrated for disrupting industries, but Keen said the destruction they leave in their path is often not of concern to web culture cheerleaders.
“There we are glamorizing the tiny little internet startup that destroys a whole industry, but we forget about the tends of thousands of people in Rochester, for example, that will lose their jobs when Kodak goes out of business and is replaced by Instagram.”
Web companies are as capitalist as pre-web companies
Web companies like to brand themselves as harbingers of the good. Think of Google’s “Do No Evil” slogan or Mark Zuckerberg’s laid-back, hoodie-wearing public persona. Keen said it’s almost entirely branding.
“I think they have successfully built their companies to be seen as organs of the public interest, things that don’t really exist to make money but to benefit mankind,” he said. “But they are, of course, massively successful, almost historically successful, multinational corporations.
And their execs are, of course, capitalists, too. “These people, the internet guys, are capitalists,” Keen said. “They’re no different from [WPP chief executive] Martin Sorrell or someone who runs General Electric or any other multinational corporation. Sometimes they present themselves as different. They dress different, speak different, but they aren’t different. No better, no worse.”
