That Time I Invented a Time Machine

I’m sitting next to Dave Morgan with my laptop on his desk. The screen shows two kinds of data feeding onto the page with a query box in the middle.

“The one on the left is my inventory,” I tell him, “expiring in real time.”

I click it and link to a page counting down the seconds, minutes, hours and days I have remaining.

Realizing it is meant literally, Dave looks up with a WTF expression on his face.

“The one on the right shows the price advertisers are bidding to acquire it,” I say pointing to the second feed on the page.

Dave’s facial expression becomes more lightbulbish.

I click and load a MediaPost page featuring the “RTB 500,” a new index we had just begun publishing. It was modeled on the S&P 500, but instead of a composite of stock market prices it was a composite of bids advertisers were making in real time to serve ads to your computer, phone or other device.

Advertisers weren’t making those bids directly to consumers, but to other “third parties” – mainly publishers who owned the content the ads were being served on, or to a long daisy-chain of “ad tech” middlemen that enable it to happen based on who and where you are, what you are doing, and sometimes even what you are feeling and thinking.

It was the main reason I was pitching Dave on on a startup that would enable consumers to receive bids representing billions of dollars directly from advertisers.

Because Dave Morgan was one of the ad tech people who enabled those bids to happen. And it was when he pitched me to write about a new company he had founded, Tacoda, and what it could actually do, that a lightbulb started going off in my own head.

Tacoda was pioneering a new field of advertising called “behavioral targeting,” which enabled advertisers to serve their ads based on what they knew about you and your behaviors, not necessarily because of the content that brought you to a publisher’s page in the first place.

“Instead of BMW paying a high CPM to reach you on the New York Times’ automotive page, it can target you when you are on a much cheaper page somewhere else,” Dave explained to me, using the term “CPM,” which for non-ad industry folk means the “cost per thousand” advertisers pay to reach consumers with their ads.

The minute he explained that to me, I realized it was ingenious and would revolutionize advertising, but that it would also be incredibly destructive to publishing, which depended on advertisers paying them to reach consumers “contextually.”

That’s what got me thinking this way in the first place, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when ad agencies began setting up their own “trading desks” to bid for audiences programmatically on “exchanges,” that it really hit me.

“You know Joe, we don’t buy media anymore,” a big agency executive told me while showing his desk to me, “We buy the audiences.”

It was at that point that I began thinking, “Someone should invent a way for the audience to control that.”

So I began inventing something that could do that and was presenting the latest version to Dave, because I thought he might be someone who wanted to solve a problem he helped create.

“The query box,” I said pointing to a box with the word “Ask:” in the middle of my laptop screen, “is where you ask advertisers what you want them to bid for.”

“I like it,” Dave said, adding, “It’s binary.”

I had heard that word used many times before, but there was something about the way Dave used it then to describe the mock-up I was showing him for “Bid/r” that made me think of it in a new way.

That everything in life – even the offers advertisers make to you – can be viewed as a binary “yes/no” decision-making process. I knew the word was also programmer/designer speak for something that could be easily processed via machine code – a series of zeroes and ones – that are the basis for everything we do with digital media.

But it was about something else – the way it could help people with what should be a simple decision-making process – that was the second time Dave Morgan enlightened and inspired me.

He also said he’d be the lead investor if I could get enough other people to help fund it, which after Dave became the lead investor wasn’t hard – even for someone like me – to find. Most of them were friends I’d gotten to know from my years covering the media industry, or just some people who must have respected me and saw the passion I had for this idea. That it wasn’t just a way that could potentially make some money, but was also a problem I was passionate about solving and that I might just have a way to solve it.

Much of the rest of this b/log will talk about some of the people who either helped inspire or helped me try to solve it, and while it still has not accomplished that, I hope it’s helped inspire others along the way to do the same. I know anecdotally from speaking to some of them, that it has had some effect. And I still believe I can help make it happen, even if the initial versions of Bid/r never got more than a few hundred people installed as “beta” users.

I learned a lot about myself and others along the way. And If I had it to do all over again, I know what I would do differently. But we are where we are now, and this narrative is part of an effort to play a role in the next version of whatever comes after this.

The here and now part is just a b/log describing some events that led up to it, but the longer term goal is to use it to build something that has actual market power and unleashes economic forces that become self-fulfilling for all those involved.

In my last dispatch – the one wishing you all a “happy new epoch!” – I described how we are just beginning to shift from an old, highly centralized media model based on big publishers, platforms and various other intermediaries, to a new decentralized one based on you and me.

I know, they said that about “social media,” right? That it was going to be a new version of the internet that would give all its users the power to express themselves directly to influence the world around us. And while it did that to some extent, most of the power it created went to the platforms that enabled it. And we’ve all seen the value of that.

Don’t get me wrong, this next version, what is commonly known as “Web3,” has its only litany of jargon, including the blockchain, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), cryptocurrencies, and other tech that are powering it. And by its description, b/log would be called a “DAO,” which stands for an autonomous decentralized organization, because it has already granted a share of itself to everyone that subscribes to it.

When those shares become more than fictional ones, we will probably have to change our tech jargon to be known as a “DAC,” which stands for a decentralized autonomous corporation, but I still cannot promise you how and when something like that might happen.

What I can tell you is that it depends on attracting enough subscribers to b/log to create a critical mass that is guaranteed to create real value.

As if granting you equity in it wasn’t enough, this newsletter has also given you your own time machine. Whether you use it or not, your own Bid/r-like ticker has already been created and is just waiting for you to use it.

It was time-stamped to the date you began subscribing to this newsletter and your supply is based on a multitude of personal health, genetic and other factors that you can adjust for, but the most recent data from the U.S. government says the average is now 77.3 years. So subtract any number you want from that based on your current age, and other factors, and reset your own machine to countdown to that date.

For now you can use b/log’s default, which is derived by subtracting the median U.S. age – 38.1 years – from that total, and setting an end date of March 31, 2061.

If you do nothing else with b/log or anything that comes from it, I hope you set your own time, add it to your desktop or mobile screen and consider it every now and then.

In the end, it’s all any of us ever really have. The rest is just a bunch of trades we make along the way.