You remember entropy from high school science class, right? Entropy is the fact that your teenager’s room descends into chaos twelve nanoseconds after it gets cleaned. Entropy is how fast things decay. It’s a physical law of nature.

But today it also applies to the value of information.

Information is worth a lot of money before someone has it. And it’s worth practically nothing after they have it. The speed at which the world goes from “doesn’t have it” to “does have it” just keeps accelerating. It can be months, weeks, days, even hours.

But unless you’re in an unusual niche, the “half life” of information is NOT years.

Information entropy, the speed at which the value of information decays, has never been faster.

One of the basic implications of information entropy is that information marketing is no longer a long-term defensible business.

That word “defensible” is really important. Ever since I started working with Richard Koch, evaluating businesses according to his Star Principle Formula, the idea of defensibility keeps coming up.

Defensible = how big and badass is the moat around your castle?

The moat around Google’s castle, Toyota’s castle or Morton’s Steakhouse castle is pretty big. None of those moats are insurmountable… but they’re way harder than ripping off somebody’s book or DVD.

Bottom line: Even if you have a star business, if it’s not defensible, well, then you probably just have a profitable hamster wheel.

I know. Because I’ve got one.

I’ve made a very comfortable living in information marketing for the last 12 years. And I do think the information business will always exist. It’s not going to disappear. People are never going to stop writing books or recording videos.

Information can never become completely worthless.

You’ll always be able to find people who will pay for certain kinds of information. And you can use information as a lead generator for darn near anything.

But an information marketing business is vastly more defensible when it’s the front end for a real business than if it’s the end in itself.

If your own information marketing business is the end in itself… you’re not necessarily in the wrong business.

You might actually be closer than you think to being in the right business.

Photo by cliffchen1973 cc by-sa

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.