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AMAZON VS. THE ANTS | PAGE 1, 2
Friedman's follow-up column, "KillingGoliath.com," trumpets the amazing impact the first article had on Bowlin's business, without ever grappling with the question of Friedman's own responsibility for that success. Once the column appeared, Bowlin clocked more than 142,000 "hits" (however he may be counting them) in less than a day, received more than 1,400 e-mails and watched his orders leap from $2,000 a month to $2,000 a day. Bowlin, Friedman says, is now poised to become "even more competitive with Amazon.com." Well, yes. What fledgling Web business wouldn't kill to have an entire column on the New York Times op-ed page written about it? Friedman tries to interpret Bowlin's success as, somehow, a sign of the power of the Net -- "You think the Internet is overrated? It's underrated." But in fact everything that's happened to Bowlin simply underscores how dependent Web businesses still are on coverage in other media. A couple of lines in Friedman's piece suggest he may feel that it was the publication of his own column on the New York Times Web site, rather than in the newspaper, that gave Bowlin a boost. But since both print articles have mentioned Bowlin's Web address, it seems impossible to separate the influence of the two media. The point is not whether Friedman's words appeared online or on paper; it is that coverage in the New York Times remains a hugely valuable prize in the Internet age. There's nothing inherently wrong with that -- when we launched Salon, a story in the Times business section certainly helped us gather our first readers. But there's something positively weird about Friedman's inability to acknowledge his own role in Bowlin's story. A kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies whenever a media giant covers some small Web site: A big publication can't spotlight a site without affecting it, changing it. Bowlin's newfound success doesn't tell us anything about whether online businesses like Amazon.com are doomed or not; all it tells us is that Friedman's story fed a lot of traffic to Bowlin's site. Now, if every single competitor to Amazon.com and other established Web businesses could line up their very own New York Times column to boost site traffic, then maybe Friedman's thesis would have some credibility. But ask the next person who does what Bowlin has done -- and the next one after that -- how easy it is to compete with Amazon without a Thomas Friedman circulating their URL in a national newspaper. The scarce commodity online is attention -- and Friedman's analysis of the Net market isn't going to make much sense until it takes that into account. To understand what's happening in the Net business today, you have to study the complex media ecology that has emerged in the interplay between the Web itself and all the pre-existing media -- TV, print, books, movies, billboards, mail-order catalogs and anything else that can snag your attention. The Web is a powerful new catalyst in this informational soup, but it doesn't single-handedly suspend every rule of the marketplace. Like so many of the more extreme Net utopians and anti-Net doomsayers, Friedman keeps making the mistake of assuming that the Internet is something so fundamentally new and strange that it transforms the universe -- when it is really simply a new communications medium that, like any other, carries its own set of unique traits, risks and opportunities. Friedman takes some pleasure in championing how the Net has allowed little-guy Lyle Bowlin to take on Amazon.com -- just as it has allowed sometime little-guy Matt Drudge to compete with the New York Times (and, for that matter, it once allowed former little-guy Amazon.com to compete with superstore booksellers like Barnes & Noble and Borders). But just as old-fashioned media coverage made Drudge's business, Friedman's own coverage seems to be making Bowlin's. That's fine -- but there's only so much coverage to go around. If I were Amazon's Jeff Bezos, I wouldn't be too worried.
E-mail Scott Rosenberg. |
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