The wrong customer problem

Seth Godin, in Advertising’s bumpy transition, has a few interesting thoughts on what sets the priorities of today’s web media. The bottom line is this:

Since advertising is paying for a big portion of the consumer web, it’s being built to please advertisers. Right now, though, what advertisers are used to buying isn’t what the web is good at building.

This is the trap. A product built solely around users will usually become more popular, more engaging and more attractive to advertisers. To please advertisers, focus on users.

Shape the product around advertisers first and you will eventually lose the users. Once that happens, the advertisers will leave too. They are not buying the page. They are buying the attention on it.