Monetization for Web2010

RobertScobleRobert Scoble Gives Away His Photos

Should We Give Our Best Away for Free?

For several months I’ve been persuading readers (preaching) to discover work that compliments their passions. My fear is that the process of monetizing detracts from our best message. Any truly great work, be it art, functional or a mix, that comes from the core of our being and needs to be passed on has great value (at least to ourselves). But the manner of trying to cost that, profit, or putting a price tag on our creations may tarnish the work. It’s a healthy fear to keep in mind, as it channels creative energies towards coming up with revenue streams that doesn’t sully our integrity, honesty, and genuine judgement.

raw recording of some thoughts on giving our best away for free: 

As you might have guessed, I’ve spent (insert large amount of time here) thinking about different monetization models for internet content/products. One of the core concepts is centered about “how best to connect internet communication tools to businesses”. The importance of this priority has been recognized by Robert Scoble. His vision for building43, manifests the principle clearly “make it easier for businesses to use the internet to improve their business results“.

FredTalksAboutLinkDollarsThe post from Fred (click image for link) got the neurons firing (thanks to Jonny Goldstein)

Fred Wilson’s #140conf conference talk

My response to Fred’s post suggests “an advertisement window/column (very Googlish) based upon the meta data (semantic) of passed links” :

Very excited about monetization potential for not only social media (facebook/twitter/friendfeed) but for web content in general. The economy of the internet is evolving. I labelled gratitude as the virtual currency in social media, but that is usually shown with thanks and a link.
I’m worried about one hiccup. If passed links are the currency, how will advertising piggy back on them. Anytime I’m paid to refer something, my genuine recommendation has had all it’s value removed.

A series of comments and replies lead to this early idea of mine:

I agree the contextual advertising isn’t there yet. But imagine if you will, updating your status on any social media you frequent. Now imagine a small box off to the side with pertinent advertising targeting the semantic meaning of your status update. For an analogy, I can lookup up dentists on Google and find one locally without ever looking at their ads (above or on the side). The same can be done within social media, I can search for a preferred dentist and ignore any ads they may have (above or on the side), plus I can get first person descriptions and feedback. The technology is rapidly developing and Google, twitter, facebook amongst other businesses are doing their best to match the semantic meaning of your searches or status updates to an appropriate advertisement/business (if they’re not they should be). See my comment about where pageviews are coming from to my blog, they’re almost all (95-100%) social media sourced referrers. Advertising dollars will follow the link passers.

Thanks to the creator of balsamiq for this awesome mockup (big thanks Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni)

MonetizationSampleFromBalsamiq

Maybe the ads should be personalized to only the users updates/status. Mixed feelings on this, if you’re reading Scobles lifestream you might just be persuaded to get a Prius. I’ve wanted one for a while (4years) but Robert’s great feedback could be the tipping point. The advertising algorithm will have to “know me” in a historical data sense. Data a virtual assistant would have easily be able to provide.

Check out 18.5minutes in to Fred’s Friday chat with Howard Lindzon for some extra thoughts on where twitter may go for monetization.

This concept has been extended to a Notional Framework for Monetization Web2010

If you’re really interested in this topic feel free to read up on how my ideas developed, and by all means share/comment your own concepts. Previously, I wrote up thoughts on monetizing and design potential for social media:

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  • http://twitter.com/Vukicevic Vladimir Vukicevic

    Would it be more powerful for the advertising to target each and every reader of your blog as opposed to just the context of what you're writing? This would probably be possible if a person is logged in using their Twitter/Facebook account. I guess this would be some sort of personal contextual advertising.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    That's the idea, those social media blocks on the right hand side could very well have dynamic information from readers.

    But what I didn't capture in the mock up was the addition of comments. Those could just as easily feed into the advertising semantic engine and generate pertinent ads to the right of this reply. —->

    Also the same engine could work on friendfeed's homepage, or twitter's homepage, or interfaces to these social media. Competing algorithms can be developed to derive meta data from natural typing language from all the big players (Google, Microsoft, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, etc.) The most relevant matchers will win and so will I :D

  • http://twitter.com/Vukicevic Vladimir Vukicevic

    I like it. With so much public data available about individuals (i.e. what they tweet, who they follow and who follows them, the RSS feeds they subscribe to, etc.) combined with the information on what they are currently reading (i.e. your blog, or their Twitter page, or FriendFeed, etc.) you could build a powerful personal contextual ad engine.

  • http://avc.blogs.com fredwilson

    so advertise to the tweeter not the tweet viewer?

    interesting idea.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    You nailed it Vladimir. Now who's building it?

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    That's right Fred. Anytime I do a search, Google/Microsoft etc advertises to my text query. Why not do the same every time I tweet (in a similar non-intrusive fashion). That's step one.

    Step two would be for a page like my blog (the mockup). You'd be advertising to anyone who happened to be on the page based on the page content (tweets, friendfeed statuses, comments), but if the readers are interested in the conversations happening, they may be interested in the same suggested links. If I'm reading Robert Scoble's status about how awesome autopilot is on his prius, or how cool your scooter is, maybe I'd be interested in some ads targeting those products/keywords.

    Step 3 would be building up personalized profiles to learn about the tweeter and make even relevant suggestions (Vlad and I hashed it above this comment some).

  • http://twitter.com/Vukicevic Vladimir Vukicevic

    Let's find someone to build it now.

  • http://twitter.com/Vukicevic Vladimir Vukicevic

    I also believe that true utility lies in combining the data used for all three steps. It makes sense that by knowing what a person tweets, what tweets a person reads, and what blogs (larger conversations) a person takes part in, that the advertiser can build a very strong profile to build quite useful contextual ads.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    By all means, excellent point. The combination of a users history, who they follow, who they interact with can all be leveraged to give them the most effective ads. I think this is a later step, we can probably get an early version working in a matter of days. I'm trying to contact Paul Buchheit of friendfeed, and Matt Mullenweg of WordPress to gauge their interest. I assume Fred can contact key people in twitter to see if they're already on a similar path. All of social media providers could benefit from this type of structure.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    There's a follow up to this post now: http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/06/23/notion…

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  • http://SocialMediaAndInteractiveMarketingBlog Jason Cronkhite

    Jumping in late but, had a chance to read through several of your posts Mark and watched Fred's video at 140. So, yes, I too have been seeing these trends on my own blog which is only about 2 months old. Essentially, I am able to see upward traffic growth from social media activity quicker than I will be able to generate from search. Plus I believe the traffic is more organically valuable than an organic search because it comes with the human influence factor just as Fred mentions.

    I found the Notional Framework interesting Marc and am really interested in the discussion as I think through various monetization models for something I've been working on. To add to the discussion on a development front, you might consider approaching the guys at Zemanta http://www.zemanta.com/about/#management-team and Thaya Kareeson @ http://omninoggin.com/about/ . Thaya built a plugin for WordPress that recognizes traffic visitation from various social sites that promotes to the visitor to subscribe to your blog feed and I'm sure that semantic scripts could be applied to display advertising in and around the content that is relative. Zemanta's tools for WordPress are able to semantically recognize content as you are publishing therefore I think that they could certainly help with applying what they do along with Thaya to help build something on your framework.

    On the content producers side, I have been thinking about how they can be rewared in terms of an ad revenue share for 1) being the producer that is helping drive ad revenue and potential sales 2) content producers need more tools to be rewarded in order to sustain content production.

    Something else that is interesting is the new model for micropayment monetization that the guys at Clicky have put out called Contenture http://contenture.com/ .

    I look forward to contributing to this conversation as things move along. Let me know how I can help Mark.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Super feedback and great suggestions. I had a feeling the pieces exist or will exist shortly addressing monetization for social sites but had forgot about Zemanta and the tool that suggests applicable links from content. That functionality just needs to be tied to aprofile with user feedback to really blow up (just my 2 cents)
    I'll email you with the area we are discussing how best to proceed and would gladly accept any ideas/collaboration you would be willing to share (we can discuss startups/stake etc there as well)

  • http://SocialMediaAndInteractiveMarketingBlog Jason Cronkhite

    Fantastic Mark. I look forward to the info and continued collaboration.

  • http://SocialMediaAndInteractiveMarketingBlog Jason Cronkhite

    Jumping in late but, had a chance to read through several of your posts Mark and watched Fred's video at 140. So, yes, I too have been seeing these trends on my own blog which is only about 2 months old. Essentially, I am able to see upward traffic growth from social media activity quicker than I will be able to generate from search. Plus I believe the traffic is more organically valuable than an organic search because it comes with the human influence factor just as Fred mentions.

    I found the Notional Framework interesting Marc and am really interested in the discussion as I think through various monetization models for something I've been working on. To add to the discussion on a development front, you might consider approaching the guys at Zemanta http://www.zemanta.com/about/#management-team and Thaya Kareeson @ http://omninoggin.com/about/ . Thaya built a plugin for WordPress that recognizes traffic visitation from various social sites that promotes to the visitor to subscribe to your blog feed and I'm sure that semantic scripts could be applied to display advertising in and around the content that is relative. Zemanta's tools for WordPress are able to semantically recognize content as you are publishing therefore I think that they could certainly help with applying what they do along with Thaya to help build something on your framework.

    On the content producers side, I have been thinking about how they can be rewared in terms of an ad revenue share for 1) being the producer that is helping drive ad revenue and potential sales 2) content producers need more tools to be rewarded in order to sustain content production.

    Something else that is interesting is the new model for micropayment monetization that the guys at Clicky have put out called Contenture http://contenture.com/ .

    I look forward to contributing to this conversation as things move along. Let me know how I can help Mark.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Super feedback and great suggestions. I had a feeling the pieces exist or will exist shortly addressing monetization for social sites but had forgot about Zemanta and the tool that suggests applicable links from content. That functionality just needs to be tied to aprofile with user feedback to really blow up (just my 2 cents)
    I'll email you with the area we are discussing how best to proceed and would gladly accept any ideas/collaboration you would be willing to share (we can discuss startups/stake etc there as well)

  • http://SocialMediaAndInteractiveMarketingBlog Jason Cronkhite

    Fantastic Mark. I look forward to the info and continued collaboration.

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