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The Dawn of the Media Credibility Gap
October 14, 2005
Search friends frustrated by the media mix's slanted dollar bias toward TV will see the first sign of the windsock shifting finally away with the Yahoo study finding search results overwhelmingly the most credible among college students:
The findings, presented Tuesday in New York, included the conclusion that 81 percent of college students rated search engines as the best source of information; friends and family were rated best by 64 percent of students, while just 34 percent said traditional media was their best source of information.
The almost 50 point spread between search and traditional media portends the shakeup of the media mix to come for this next generation. Sure, TV will always offer the quick fix of tens of millions of eyeballs at a moments notice, but TIVO-related challenges aside, I think we are seeing in this surveyed generation quite a new phenomenon: the expectation of an algorithmic, non-human, objective element as the ultimate winnower of credibility that immediately discounts information sources not born of this component. Read: paid advertising.
Cynicism has and always will be the cherished rite of passage of attending university, yet we must not forget this is really the first generation to graduate having grown up on search. If the algorithm has been your standard of objectivity from the start it's difficult to suddenly fully trust the human, all-too-human element of pay-for-play. PPC separated to the right will become as figurative as it is now literal, I believe.
All posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at October 14, 2005 02:03 PM
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