Finally, a way for us schmucks to make money in social media! July 9, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , 1 comment so far
Verbs 2.0 — tweeting, digging, blogging, emailing (ok, that one is 1.0) — can now make you some extra change for doing what you do already. All you need to get is a Google AdSense account and add it to your MessageDance profile. Send YouTube videos, Songza songs, Digg articles, Amazon product recs, and emails to Twitter (and any of your other social networks) and when people click through to your message detail on MessageDance.com, your AdSense ads will show on the right side bar. The impressions and clicks are all yours!
Imagine, when you tweet about how you just ate a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast, you might make someone realize it would be cool to order a box of Wheaties with their face on the cover. And you”ll make some money off that weirdness (maybe $0.02, but hey it adds up).
But seriously, why not? Set it up once and see what happens. We at MessageDance are constantly surprised by the traffic we get on our users content. It”s your content, so someone should make money off of it. Why not you?
Here”s how you set it up.
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I clicked on a web ad today! June 12, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a comment
It's probably been over two years, but I actually clicked on one today. Because Gmail thinks I'm a spammer, I've been getting tons of delivery failure messages. Gmail served up an ad for help (for a price) for getting email accounts off spamming blacklists. Geez, talk about a perfect revenue scheme for Google. Practically shut down a user's account and then serve an ad for a vendor to help you fix it. Righteous business model. Not evil?
Despite Google's AdSense victory over me today, it has been a very, very long time since I clicked on an ad. Honestly, when was the last time you clicked on AdSense or a banner ad with the intention of possibly buying something? Seems to me that today's web ads (read adwords/adsense) could be built on a house of cards. I worked at Ask Jeeves when the banner ad business collapsed. It wasn't pretty — and it wasn't until Google devised contextual ads (with a large enough base of ads to allow specific targeting) that online ads became (a very good) business again. However, revenue for online ads is declining again, signaling the need for a disruptive ad model to spur new and robust growth.
The next generation of ad products will not only need to be contextual and targeted, but will need to be interactive. I need more than relevant hyper-linked text to get me motivated to look further. I need marketers to understand the social media I use and communicate with me the way I do. Use Twitter, FriendFeed, MessageDance, and even TiVo. Have my friends opt-in to show me what they liked. Engage in a conversation with me, if I choose. I know this is controversial and not fully-baked, but main-stream web users are quickly becoming desensitized to the current way of delivering ads.
Google believes it is their "moral" duty to help fix online ads; it's also 98% of their revenue. Hurry up because Web 2.0 is counting on you!
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