The other day, Dave Winer broke his Cuisinart coffee machine and was, within 5 minutes, able to replace it on Amazon. Therefore, online advertising is now dead.
That's a funny way to put it but you're deliberately ignoring the point he was making, which is how he selected that particular coffee maker: "people who bought this also bought this".
I don't believe for a second that online advertising is dead, because advertising has been around for a long time and I don't see why it should go away just because like in every recession it's going to be severely hit.
But the issue is click-throughs. I do have my doubts whether people will keep clicking on ads as much as they did in the past. I don't click on ads. I never have. Not because it's some kind of protest but because I never felt it would lead to anything I wanted. And there has been a study (sorry I don't have the quote) showing that the more people are familiar with the internet (or even generally more educated) the less they click on ads.
The point Winer was making, that people will rely more on peer recommendations and generally knowledge about what other people do than on advertising campains is plausible in my view.
I wasn't sure someone would be able to summarize Winer's reasoning without imploding the Universe, but I guess we are still here, so kudos to you.
This whole 'the economic world is ending and you must learn to live in the new economy that is totally unlike the old economy because times are really bad' thing is getting really, really old.
I think it's even worse than the way you put it. He broke a specific brand product, and wanted an exact replacement. Does he think that some other form of advertising, say on a TV commercial, would have convinced him to buy a different replacement product for an essentially proprietary product? Didn't think so.
I frankly wanted to link to his p5. I am very grateful that he allowed me to do so. I didn't know I wanted to link to p5 until he showed me that it was available.
