Where Search and Social Draw their Funds

The Business Pages these days tend to focus on Mergers & Acquisition, Finance, Mobile Devices, and that sector of Internet business represented by big search engines and the social Media.

It is the last category that interests me. There is a great deal of hoopla about Internet companies, but those that provide a free service all draw their income from the Advertising expenditures by the rest of the economy.

So the question arises, how big is that “funding sector.” Is it as large as the media’s interest in Internet startups and IPOs? The surprising answer is that Total Advertising Expenditure in 2014 was $161 billion; that comes to less than 1 percent (0.92%) of the Total Economy measured by GDP, or $17.4 trillion. My number for Advertising comes from Group M, a global media company. Some put the 2014 number at $180.12 billion (1.03% of GDP). In 2008, advertising was $141.7 billion, 0.99 percent of an economy of $14.3 trillion. The Total Advertising Expenditure category has actually shrunk as a percent of GDP.

A great deal of media hoopla, but in reality a tiny and shrinking slice of the economy.

Pre-Raptured? Not!

Some mornings, laughing at the news, Brigitte and I are quite convinced that the Rapture—or perhaps it’s only the Pre-Rapture—has already been, and the two of us were Left Behind, or maybe we were only Pre-Abandoned. So who’s in the clouds? The Pre-Rapture is that strange dimension called the social media. The occasion this morning was the discovery in the Wall Street Journal that Twitter has introduced “favoriting.” It comes in two varieties, evidently, but only in the mind of the person who does it. Straight-favoriting is, ah, the same as clicking Like on other social media sites. Hate-favoriting is exactly the same, but your vast network of followers will know that you favorite the feed because you hate it. Funny that a network that restricts messages to 140 characters would “favorite” (I count 8 letters) versus “like” (4).

Twitter has earlier sounded the Retweet—which became a monumental fave thus probably evolving into favoriting other streams which now, appropriately iconicized, decorate the once very arid Twitter page.

Norman Mailer, who started well but then grew ever more needy, as they say, needy for more attention, so much so that he once stabbed his second of six wives, and also ran for Mayor of New York, once wrote a book entitled Advertisements for Myself—and thus might be viewed as the chief prophet of the social media. Soon after his death in 2007, the End of Time produced the explosion of Pre-Raputure—which, as it unfolds, renders those of us left grubbing in the ground, raising our butterflies (of which three new ones are approaching the chrysalis stage again) totally baffled about the nature of genuine reality up in the sky.

Meanwhile, to keep the unbelievers down in the trenches properly penitent, the paper companies have introduced their own magical innovation, called desheeting. You don’t know what desheeting is? Well, the toilet paper roll? The paper towel roll? Remember those old things? Now they cost the same or more than they ever did; but, innovation!, they have fewer sheets. But, with the employment of new arts of puffing up the product, they look as fat as ever.