Jargon sticks between my teeth like a raspberry seed.  It’s lazy man’s speak–the hollow comfort of the familiar, or a way of clouding meaning or speaking falsely without actively lying.  Sometimes both.  And so it is with the word “monetize.”   It means, as best as I can tell, making money off of an enterprise that hasn’t before.  It’s commonly used in relation to profitless Internet companies, who manage to get viewers or “eyeballs,” as they are indelicately termed, in the hope that one fine day a way to make money off of those viewers (or eyeballs) will magically reveal itself.   There’s gold in that thar’ river!  Anyhow, the jargon, general as it is, currently creates a special amount of confusion when considering companies like Twitter.   To say they hope to “monetize” their popularity implies, I guess, to make a profit.  Since, though, there is no distinction in the jargon between “sales,” which are easier to come by and “profits,” which, with discipline, eventually might come  from the sales, the distinction is blurred.  It is esential to understand that Twitter currently makes neither of either.  No sales.  No profits.  To really understand their predicament (one faced by many Internet firms that have gone soft white underbelly up) you need to be clear that sales, step one, don’t exist.  The phrase “monetize,” like all jargon, is too broad a measuring stick.

Tags: Business, Words

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