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"Selling eyeballs" is a phrase so laughable that clever Valleyfolk use it ironically, to distance themselves from the first dot-com bubble. "Monetizing the eyeballs" ranked with "scaling across the enterprise" as one of the increasingly meaningless buzzwords as the Internet became more than an ad page and a catalog.

But a new boom means we're back to starting companies with no business plan, and the default rescue strategy is, once again, advertising. The New York Times writes a trend piece on web advertising using the grotesque Valleyspeak term for a site's audience: "As Online Ads Grow, Eyeballs Are Valuable Again on the Web."

Which buzzword will return next? Probably a phrase satirized in the 2005 musical, "Goin' Dot Com":

We'll give you value-added cuz were results-driven. We'll answer your call-to-action and well seek the win-win. It's a scalable revenue model with a client-focused mindset. If we nail down those benchmarks we'll reach our target market.

As Online Ads Grow, Eyeballs Are Valuable Again on the Web [New York Times]
Play Brings Back Dot Com Memories [CBS News]