I came across an article on CCNMoney.com earlier this week relating to slide.com which was founded by Max Levchin. Levchin is known for co-founding and selling PayPal to eBay back in 2002 for $1.5 billion. The article, Are these widgets worth half a billion? got my attention. Widgets have potential, but in their current state will work for only a few small percentage of advertisers. Actually, I should refrain from saying that; they will essentially only work for branded advertisers or those interested in engagement or conversational advertising. I would refer to engagement or conversational advertising as wasteful advertising.
How do you judge engagement or conversational advertising? As an industry we can’t even come to terms on accurately judging page views and reach, and now all the buzz is engagement and “conversational marketing”? Give me a break! I would not put a penny into widgets or conversational marketing efforts unless I paid for it solely on a performance metric such as CPA. The absence of CPA widget and conversational marketing speaks volumes. Try and find a network or publisher who will be paid solely on performance, there are not many out there because they know it doesn’t convert!
Adweek ran an article this week as well titled Social Media Metrics Are Still a Work in Progress by Brian Morrissey. This article provides an accurate analysis on engagement and conversational marketing. Readers interested in the topics should definitely read the article.
Wired also ran an article this week titled MySpace and Friends Need to Make Money. And Fast! . There was nothing overly compelling presented, but it does add context to this post and speaks to the monetization efforts occurring in the vertical.
Finally, there is an interesting post on UADDit.com, which features pictures inside the web 2.0 workplace of these social networks this post relates to. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Craigslist, Mozilla, Joost, Flickr, last.fm, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Netvibes and reddit are featured with brief background provided.
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