Jeff Jarvis, the founder of entertainment weekly and seer into the internet media future, posted a slightly different take on the “small internet mice will destroy old media dinosaurs.” The renowned videoblog Rocketboom just auctioned off a single week of advertising on ebay for $40,000:

And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates.

Or let me summarize the problem in one word. Big advertisers and big agencies are chickenshit. They need to grow some balls or else they’ll find new competitors running circles around them. The explosion — the rocketboom — that has already come to newspapers, magazines, TV networks, the music industry is coming next to the ad business.

Please take this, advertisers, as a friendly kick in the pants.

Calling people “chickenshit” is a great way to get their attention but not necessarily get you to change their minds. Instead we would point out that the media dinosaurs obsessed with control should realize quite quickly that if they want “metrics,” “guarantees,” and “controls” then the internet is lightyears ahead of other media in that department.