John riffs on Ross Mayfield’s idea: John Battelle’s Searchblog: Sell Side Advertising: A New Model?
The short version: Imagine online ads that carry money and rules with them. If you’re a blogger or web publisher or even someone sending out email, and you fit the rules for a given ad, you can publish it. Every time you do, you get paid.
The ads deplete the money in their account and then vanish. If the ads are working, the advertiser refills them. If publishers find that readers like them, they publish them more often.
It’s upside down because control is now flipped from advertiser to publisher/reader.
Let’s go one step further and imagine that every ad knows who sees it (because we like the non-anonymous net). Then, of course, advertisers can pay more when their ads are seen by “better” ranked viewers.
I don’t think this works in the short run, though.
Despite the success of adwords, almost all advertising is bought regardless of its effectiveness. The bulk of ads are bought by giant companies that don’t measure and are afraid to measure. (Afraid, because if they measured, they might fail, and if they fail, they fear they might get fired…) Adwords scares them because it’s so entrepreneurial. This goes past that times 1000.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine a better scenario for the future. The question is when…
August 26, 2004
Thanks for reading.
ChangeThis :: Do Less
August 24, 2004
Chris Meadows talks about the free ipod sites, among others.That’s All I’ve Got to Say: Free iPods: Worth the Cost?
The idea is to gain trial and permission by enticing people to recruit friends to a service in exchange for a “free” $300 gift.
I don’t believe this is a template for everyone, but it’s one more reminder of how many things that we used to just guess about we can now measure, improve and bribe upon.
August 23, 2004
Readers know that it’s extremely unusual for me to plug a business. PR people have learned that the worst way to show up on my blog is to pitch me.
So, it’s with some excitement that I point you to eggplant active media workers collective | summer 2004. These are the guys who did all the technology behind ChangeThis.
On time
On a shoestring budget
With a smile.
I just want to commend them to anyone who needs great web tech and qualifies as a client. Nice work, Arthur!
August 19, 2004
Thanks to Andrew Rupert for the link:
Gnomads: Global Trekking Gnome
Check out: mediabistro.com: Freelance Marketplace
This brand new site changes everything (everything gets changed a lot, doesn’t it?)
It’s good news if you need writing or even writerly thinking. There’s no excuse for your manuals, books, magazines, reports, etc. to be less than stellar when people like this are there to help.
The bad news is, why are people this good looking for work? (answer? the best ones aren’t… but it never hurts to keep your name out there).
As the web matures, we’re seeing one marketplace after another get more efficient and simpler. I’m pining for the days when I used to spend weeks to find writers this good. This site would have saved me days and dollars.
Using technorati and other tools, it’s easier than ever for an organization to watch the blogosphere and to communicate directly with people that others listen to.
Is your organization investing that time? Check out this story:
MarketingStudies.net: The Marketing Diary: Perfect “Customer” Service and ChangeThis
August 18, 2004
Two interesting things on the radar today.
1. thousands of people ignoring my confirmation email because the return address looked funny
and
2. a few notes complaining that ChangeThis uses PDFs. Like this one:
The point should be what\’s being said, not that is green
and has a bunch of red lines running across it. For people who print out
email before they read it, I guess this is the sort of thing they\’d like.
Always struck me as something of a minority, though.
You lose searchability – try finding a key phrase from within the text on
Google. You can\’t cut and paste excerpts in references – not without
opening multiple programs. (And if you can using Internet Explorer on
Windows, well, funny thing, not everyone lives in the monoculture…)
I see already how you are having to handle people not understanding why
they can\’t just read the darn things. Why add that extra layer of
complexity? Isn\’t it the message that matters most?
———————–
I refuse to enter the “is PDF bad” debate, but the one thing we all have to agree on is this: OF COURSE it matters what it looks like.
We judge books and blogs and tv shows and even people “by their covers” every single day.
Acknowledging that makes it easier to spread your ideas, and it alerts you to the fact that you might be embracing some ideas (like who to vote for) based on cues that have nothing to do with logical, rational reality. Abe Lincoln would come in fourth in a three way election if it were held today.
I’ve been building my list of monthly announcement subscribers (which I refer to–in my head and in my software–as “Blogmonthly”) since 1998. At the beginning, it was single opt in, because at the time, that was the most aggressive kind.
Since then, Double Opt In (which means you not only sign up, but then confirm by email that it was really and truly you who signed up) has become the most rigorous standard. And a lot of legitimate opt in lists (like mine) are now being blocked as spam.
SO
If you got a note today that asked you to confirm that you want to get BlogMonthly, that was real, and it was from me, and if you still want to get it, just click on the link. You can ignore all the fields that you see after that… it’s the default of the database and I’m just not clever enough to delete them.
If you want to subscribe, Seth Godin: Subscribe, have at it.
Thanks!
