Whilst we’ve seen a massive re-structuring of the media industries in the last fifteen years and the inclusion into the media landscape of online consumption and social networking, we haven’t exactly witnessed the death of advertising. Instead the talk is all about new ‘models’ of how individual user behaviour might become the trigger to drive advertising and increase revenues.

We’re used to this in our offline worlds. The information we exchange for discounts with supermarket ‘loyalty’ cards is analysed to better understand shopping behaviour in ways that that behaviour might be leveraged for profit. And advertising is the key. There are digital parallels in the online world. We buy online and leave a digital footprint. And Amazon is right there to recommend (advertise, right?) what we might just like to buy next.

What’s more interesting, less obvious, and somewhat perturbing, is that in our quest for information, we actually participate in creating the advertising that accompanies the quest. Online search engines are configured in such a way that our tacit participation is an essential feature for their ‘success’. We search, and Google finds. But how? Google, along with Yahoo! and others, uses a combination of keyword relevance, popularity of search terms, links to other sites, and the behaviour of end-users to determine the order of the search results we see. Our behaviour in following the links causes those links to rise higher in the hierarchy of Google results: they’re ‘ranked’ higher. Because we rarely go beyond page two of the search results, popularity breeds relevance. Interestingly, a search on Google for Nigerian headresses, resulted in only one source of information coming from Africa in the first three pages. Now, at the same time a number of strategic partnerships between media companies and search engines such as Google during the last few years has meant that targeted advertising (what Google often refers to as ‘contextual’ advertising) has become very ‘interested’. The agreement signed between Google and News Corporation shows how ‘interested’.

Under the terms of the agreement, Google will be obligated to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to Fox Interactive Media of $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments. These guaranteed minimum revenue share payments are expected to be made over the period beginning in the first quarter of 2007 and ending in the second quarter of 2010. (News Corp Press Release)

The new strategy is then to use the user in order to maximise profits from advertising. An innovative model, but … business as usual?

So, when we think that we’re consuming information by searching on Google and clicking through to the site we want, part of what we’re actually doing is working for Google to produce more ‘relevant’ search results which provide grist to the advertisers mill. And that makes ‘user-generated content’ sound even spookier.