If you put your house on the market, you will be able to describe it fully and include photographs, video, floor plans, tax records, utility and repair bills, even a little mood music. The chances that a potential buyer for your house will see your ad are improved because the information highway will make it easy for anyone to look it up. The whole system of real estate agencies and commissions may be changed by the principals’ having direct access to so much information.
At first, on-line classified ads won’t be very attractive, because not many people will be using them. But then word-of-mouth from a few satisfied customers will entice more and more users to the service. There will be a positive-feedback loop created as more sellers attract more buyers and vice versa. When a critical mass is achieved, which might be only a year or two after the service is first offered, the information highway’s classified advertising service will be transformed from a curiosity to the primary way private sellers and buyers get together.
Direct-response advertising—the junk-mail business is in for even bigger changes. Today, a lot of it really is junk, because we cut down a lot of trees in order to mail out material, much of which is discarded unopened. Direct-response advertising on the information highway will come in the form of an interactive multi-media document rather than a piece of paper. Although it won’t waste natural resources, there will have to be some way to make sure you don’t get thousands of these almost-free communications a day.
You won’t be drowned by the deluge of unimportant information because you’ll use software to filter incoming advertising and other extraneous messages and spend your valuable time looking at those messages that interest you. Most people will block e-mail ads except for those about product areas of particular concern. One way for the advertiser to capture your attention will be to offer a small amount of money—a nickel or a dollar, perhaps—if you will look at an ad. When you have watched it, or as you’re interacting with it, your electronic account gets credited and the advertiser’s electronic account is debited. In effect, some of the billions of dollars now spent annually on media advertising, and on the printing and postage of direct-mail advertising, will instead be divvied up among consumers who agree to watch or read ads sent directly to them as messages.
Mailings offering this sort of paying advertisement could be extremely effective because they can be carefully targeted. Advertisers will be smart about sending messages worth money only to people who meet appropriate demographics. A company such as Ferrari or Porsche might send $1 messages to car enthusiasts, on the chance that seeing a cool new car and hearing the sound of its engine will generate interest. If the ad led to even one in 1,000 people’s buying a new car as a result, it would be worthwhile to the company. They could adjust the amount they offer according to the customer’s profile. Such ads will be available to those not on the advertiser’s A-list. For instance, if a sixteen-year-old car-crazy kid wants to experience a Ferrari, and is willing to do it for nothing, he’ll get the message too.
This may sound a little strange, but it is just another use of the market mechanism for friction-free capitalism. The advertiser decides how much money it is willing to bid for your time, and you decide what your time is worth.
Advertising messages, like the rest of your incoming mail, will be stored in various folders. You will instruct your computer how to do the sorting for you. Unread mail from friends and family members might be in one folder. Messages and documents that relate to a personal or business interest would be in other folders. And advertisements and messages from unknown people could be sorted by how much money was attached to them. There would be a group of 1-cent messages, a group of 10-cent messages, and so forth. If there was no fee attached, they could be refused. You will be able to scan each message and dispose of it if it isn’t of interest. Some days you might not look into any of the advertising message folders. But if someone sent you a $10 message, you would probably take a look—if not for the money, then just to see who thought reaching you was worth $10.
You won’t have to take the money someone bids, of course. When you accept the message, you’ll be able to cancel the payment, so it’s really just the amount the person puts at risk to get your attention. The sender’s credit will be checked in advance. If a man sends you a $100 message suggesting that he is your long-lost brother, you might forgive him the money if, in fact, he turned out to be your brother. On the other hand, if he was just someone trying to get your attention to sell you something, you would probably keep the money, thank you very much.
In the United States, advertisers currently spend more than $20 a month per American family to subsidize free broadcast and cable television. Ads in general are so familiar they don’t really bother us when we watch television or listen to the radio. We understand that programs are “free” because of the commercials. Customers pay for them indirectly because advertising costs are built into the prices of cornflakes, shampoo, and diamonds. We also pay for entertainment and information directly when we buy a book or a movie ticket, or order a pay-per-view movie. The average American household pays a total of $100 a month for movie tickets, subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, books, cable television fees, compact discs and tapes, video rentals, and the like.
When you pay for entertainment by buying a tape or a disc, your rights to reuse or resell it are restricted. If you buy a copy of Abbey Road by the Beatles, you’re actually purchasing the physical disc or tape and a license to replay, any number of times, for noncommercial purposes, the music stored on it. If you buy a paperback book, what you’re really buying is the paper and ink and the right to read, and allow others to read, the words printed on that particular paper with that particular ink. You don’t own the words and you can’t reprint them, except in narrowly defined circumstances. When you watch a television show, you don’t own it, either. In fact, it took a United States Supreme Court decision to confirm that people in this country can legally videotape a television show for their personal use.
The information highway will enable innovations in the way that intellectual property, such as music and software, is licensed. Record companies, or even individual recording artists, might choose to sell music a new way. You, the consumer, won’t need compact discs, tapes, or any other kinds of physical apparatus. The music will be stored as bits of information on a server on the highway. “Buying” a song or album will really mean buying the right to access the appropriate bits. You will be able to listen at home, at work, or on vacation, without carrying around a collection of titles. Anyplace you go where there are audio speakers connected to the highway, you’ll be able to identify yourself and take advantage of your rights. You won’t be allowed to rent a concert hall and play that recording of the music or create an advertisement that incorporated it. But in any noncommercial setting, anywhere you go, you’ll have the right to play the song without additional payment to the copyright holder. In the same way, the information highway could keep track of whether you had bought the right to read a particular book or see a movie. If you had, you’d be able to call it up at any time, from any information appliance anywhere.