Wednesday, June 06, 2007 7:33 AM
As has been widely covered across the blawgosphere this week, the new legal-focused website Avvo has officially gone live (see Kevin O'Keefe's post Consumer legal site Avvo to launch tomorrow?).
In reading the inaugural post, And So It Begins . . . Avvo Launches Its Beta . . ., from the Avvo Blog by Mark Britton, the CEO and President of Avvo, I was struck by one line:
For consumers, Avvo’s mission is to give them the information and guidance they need to choose the right lawyer – for free.
In particular, the last two words: "for free."
Why? Because for free is part of a reemerging trend coming to the legal space. For free already exists, of course, but with the emergence of Google and its Ad Words platform (and Yahoo and its own ad network), the potential for viable for free websites supported by advertising, partnerships and affiliations is growing. These companies have lots of cash to either buy or develop the tools needed to make advertising a thousand times more efficient, while at the same time opening the door to millions of small businesses (and law firms) for easy, targeted advertising. Watch how Google integrates newly-acquired Feedburner's 650,000+ RSS feeds, into its AdWords/Adsense systems, for example.
This is not to say that companies relying on paid subscription or access models will be supplanted by for free. However, there are clearly pieces of their businesses that have extra large targets on them. And, those pieces will either have revisit their business models to figure out how to compete against for free, hope that for free is not sustainable, or simply suffer revenue bleeding from a thousands little cuts.
Avvo is going after just one of those pieces. Justia has already started after others. More are coming, of that I am sure.
For free. Hmmm. Good stuff.