“Stop Selling Scarcity” ↦

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.

Jeff Jarvis strikes at the heart of the new economic reality that the Internet has brought about: the marginal costs of distributing information on the Internet approach zero as the number of users increases. Even more to the point, once information gets onto the Internet, it can and will be copied. There is no such thing as scarcity on the Internet. Many “old media” companies are trying to adjust this reality to match their pre-Internet business models and this is exactly backwards; reality does not adjust.