Wolff: Television is the new television

Here's a giddy projection: Digital advertising will surpass television advertising in 2019, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a new study.

This is one of those lines in the sand meant to confirm the central thesis of the digital medium: that it will one day be bigger than traditional media, and, most of all, the killer medium, television. Now that has come to pass.

Except it hasn't. Or it is one more example of the way digital, which was supposed to be the most precisely measurable medium, uses measurements to lie about itself.

In a greater sense, digital has not bested television in the advertising market but ruined its own advertising market.

The economics of advertising used to be about scarcity. Coherent audiences of efficient size were difficult to amass. That very uniqueness, the frisson of this coming together, generated impact, for which advertisers were willing to pay high rates.

The digital premise was to reassemble or, in effect, to steal the television audience with a new free-content model, then offer it with measurement tools in much more efficient shapes and sizes. In some curious sense, it succeeded too well. It created a permanent, ever-reachable audience. One that was neither scarce nor, given the lack of event or context (even opening a newspaper was event and context), paying much attention.

Hence, with limitless advertising opportunities and lessened impact, ad prices began to slide.

Worse still for digital media, audiences were suddenly identifiable not by the media brands they consumed but by the way they behaved. Our cookies rather than our media choices identified us.

In simplest terms, advertisers no longer had to pay The New York Times to reach a New York Times-reading audience. Rather, audiences were assembled by technology middlemen who repackaged and sold them — at a steep discount. Indeed, many of the new "programmatic" desks that sold these bundles sold them in real-time auctions. These bundled audiences were so plentiful — in some sense, it was the world's population packaged and sold — that it was one of the few instances in which auctions drove the price down instead of up.

This created quite terrific businesses for the chief aggregators of traffic, most notably Google and Facebook. In effect, these platforms provided the technology you used to get content — but were not content creators themselves. By a fluke of digital media's development, they were not paying for the content they developed. In effect, Google and Facebook became like cable companies, the pipes through which traffic flowed. Unlike cable companies, which over time came to pay content creators a piece of the cable subscription pie, Google and Facebook give nothing to their content partners.

They amassed an audience, selling advertising against this traffic, on its way to the content created by other companies or individuals. On top of that, since content creators depended on Google and Facebook traffic, these platforms in a complex transaction became the central clearinghouse for selling ads on other people's content — taking a percentage of all they sold. In other words, price declines in a glutted market did not affect them if the market kept expanding, which it did, in part because prices continued to go down.

Good for Google and Facebook but terrible for content creators, who got lower and lower rates for their limited space. Content creators had to grow or inflate their audiences in a desperate bid to stay above water. BuzzFeed, one of the most successful media brands at traffic growth, bragged of an audience of 150 million users a month, bigger than the Super Bowl — yet it had the revenue of a midsize monthly magazine and reportedly no profits.

These new economics of mass audiences providing paltry returns began to have a profound effect on content: It needed to cost less and attract more traffic. Indeed, vast amounts of content was nothing more than someone else's content recycled with a new headline, a sameness and repetition naturally creating shorter and shorter attention spans. Traffic is certainly the right word — much better than audience. Digital traffic is always whizzing by, most of it measured in half-seconds of attention. As an advertiser, the best you can hope for is something akin to the glimpse given billboards in the days when they cluttered American highways. Another reason advertising rates plunge.

It is not that digital media, by surpassing television's total numbers, took TV's business. The PriceWaterhouseCoopers study projects that from 2014 to 2019, TV advertising will grow from $69.2 billion to $81.05 billion. Indeed, digital is not so much taking business from high-margin television advertising but from low-margin, direct-selling advertising — direct mail, coupons, circulars, classifieds — a business that has always been bigger, and significantly less profitable, than television advertising. In the digital space, it is less profitable still.

There is, then, a striking, obvious and smart reason why both BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post announced last week that their new goal is to enter the television business.

Wolff is the author of the new book "Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media In the Digital Age."