I am slowly starting to settle into a routine here in California. The past few months have been filled with new beginnings- a new school for the kids, a new job and commute for Tina, new grocery stores and restaurants and little league fields. The Taxi cab-hailing hustle of Manhattan has given way to hustling my bike to the top of Mt Tam.
Ideas don’t change at the same pace as activities, however, and I find myself thinking through the same issues about transparency that stimulated this blog in the first place. Back then I was focused on soft dollars and the opacity of financial markets not media markets:
…soft dollars and bundled commissions are the vig that generates much of the wealth among the brokerage industry in New York, which in turn lubricates expense accounts at lunch time and grand Park Avenue co-ops and East Hampton beachfronts. Is it not ironic that New York has a mayor whose namesake company benefits more from monthly soft dollar payments than perhaps any other financial institution. In a way, Bloomberg has taken the notion of value-added brokerage services to the peak of civic duty. Our city itself reflects the residual value of opacity in financial markets. And so the question comes back to what happens to the brokerage industry when transparency become of more value to investors than opacity?
Three years later, soft dollar pratices are as opaque as ever. The SEC has catered to the rich interests of hedge fund and stock brokerage lobbyists and enabled both sides to continue their practice of doing business with eachother in a very gray market. Even the most sophisticated individuals outside of the financial services industry have little sense of what is really going on, in terms of the ways in which large institutional investors and large banks and brokers profit from closed data practices.
This is not that different from the dynamics of the online advertising environment- there are large institutional advertisers doing business with large media companies and advertising networks. Despite the pre-text of openness and transparency, the online media market works hard to obscure the discovery of price by the very individuals producing it; namely the people who are using the medium, searching for things, clicking on ads, and conducting commercial transactions. The web user, like the individual investor, has resigned himself to letting larger interests capture, aggregate, and monetize his data behavior. He has been led to believe that this is simply part of the bargain of having such "low" transaction costs for trading stocks or searching for information.
If I had to draw a continuous line through all of my disparate activities over the past ten years, this would be it: identifying and interpreting the direct economic value of an individual data actor. We may never in our lifetime see a day when a person develops an acute, vested interest in the value of his data; the spread between the value of a handful of clicks and that of a mass of aggregate behavior is significant.
Although it may be hard to keep track of the progression of Media Futures, we are stuck between the end of Alchemy and the beginning of Arbitrage. This is where the creativity stops and the money kicks in; not that surprising against the backdrop of so much M&A activity (DoubleClick, RightMedia, StumbleUpon, etc.)
In May 2005, I made this transition in the first Media Futures series. It was etymological in nature and only hinted at the real activities that I was engaged with as an entrepreneur, as I handed over the reins of Majestic Research to a new CEO in order to focus on creating Root Markets. Flash forward two years and I am at a similar juncture; this time moving from Root in NY to AttentionSoft in SF.
The transition from Alchemy to Arbitrage that I want to describe this time will be more personal, now that the philosophical ground work has been established. I want to trace the evolution of a central idea- transparency- through the founding of a new investment research process in 2002 all the way through the creation of a new consumer data platform in 2007.
As always, thanks for staying tuned.
