Thursday, November 08, 2007

I would totally pay for that

"Hey that website is really cool!"
"Yeah, but how do they make any money?"

That is the number one question on everyone's mind who is paying attention to the web and technology these days.   Check out that new video on youtube, oh wait, how do they make money?   There are no ads on the site, so I don't know how they do it, except for the fact that they're owned by Google, so they can suck on the teet of the "Big G."   In fact, most of the new and cool sites out there don't make money by any other means, than advertising.   So everyone wants to find out how to target the advertising to the audience so people will actually click on these links, instead of doing google searches for firefox extensions to hide advertising on websites.

Fact: In all my years of using the Internet (12 years), I have clicked on an estimated 10 advertising links.   Is this number, multiplied by the number of people who use the internet, divided by 12 equal to the amount of money the internet has raised in the past 12 years?   That might not make logical sense, because ads must work for someone - just not for me, any of my friends, or any of my friends' friends.   But perhaps my parents - maybe.

Regardless, there are just some things on the internet that are just not useful to be supported by ads.   Even the mediums that are easy to be advertised on, such as video, are annoying.   We all fast-forward through the ads on television when we record something - some people even start watching a show 10 minutes later than it starts, just so they can watch the whole thing without ads.   Some people stop fast-forwarding when they see a new "Get a Mac" ad with the Mac and the PC guy, but that's definitely the exception, not the rule.   Nobody stops fast-forwarding through the latest Oppenheimer Funds ad, no matter how cool Gene Hackman's voice is.

Here's what I think the problem with ads are - their topic matter is too far removed from the original reason you sat down to consume the media in the first place.   If you're watching a baseball game, and you see an ad for a car, you're not making the connection.   Even if there is a sponsor for the game ("the post-game show, presented by whoever") - like pontiac in college football, you're still not thinking cars when you watch football.

The fix: Overt product placement.   Sure you watch movies, and you see the company logos show up on computers on certain people's desks (the bad guys have Dells, and the good guys always have Apple iPhones by the way - it's just the natural order of things), but they don't actually mention them.   It would be ridiculous to watch a movie and hear them talking about how much they "Love the new operating system from Apple - Leopard!   It's so cool because of these cool new features!   Now where did the bad guys hide that nuclear bomb?"   But that's alright because you paid an exorbitant fee to see the movie in the first place.   But in something like a round table discussion podcast like This Week in Tech (TWiT.tv - Leo Laporte's podcast group), or MacBreak Weekly (again, TWiT.tv), they are sponsored frequently by Audible.com.   Every week, they mention that they are sponsored by Audible.com, and all of the people who are on the podcast, go around and say their favorite books to listen to, and why.   It makes it personal, and the people who are saying why they like the books are people who I know and respect in the first place, since I'm listening to the podcast.   Weave the advertising  (but not underhandedly) into the media, and there will definitely be a return on that investment.

Another solution for the problem of making money on something that's not good for advertising, is actually a very old solution - pay for it.

I know, I know, "The User is NOT Me, the User is NOT Me" blah blah blah, but this is how I actually think this could work.   A user sets up an account at a website kind of like pay pal, where they can control how much money goes into it (not a direct draw from a credit card or bank account or something - something they have to re-up themselves), and then websites who choose to use this sort of internet currency can have an option to "View this site without advertising, for $0.05 a session."   I would totally go for that.   If I could view Mac Daily News without ads and popup crap all the time, I would definitely give them 5 cents every time I went there (well, ok, 5 cents for like 10 minutes or something, or however long it takes me to read the news).   I have no doubt that someone has thought of this before, and shot it down because they thought nobody would go for it, but I'm telling you, so many people would go for it - not all, but soooo many, just to not have to deal with ads ever again.   I already pay for premium services that charge a small amount a year (flickr for example) that for 12 dollars a year, I can access an amazing amount of features and storage, and community.   Amortize that over 365 days, and that's awesome - a dollar a month, 0.03 cents a day.

I mean, if Google decided to say "you can do unlimited searches for 12 dollars a year," I would totally pay for that.

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