Ad Hawks

I made a mental note not to write back to back to back posts about tools, but I have allowed myself this exemption because though the post is about Digg and Twitter, its equally about advertising/revenue models.

Last week, Digg announced Digg Ads, their new advertising platform, to be released as a pilot in a few months. Sponsored ads, marked so, will appear as part of the stream, and the twist is that the more the ad is dugg, the lesser the advertiser will have to pay. The idea, of course, is that the more relevant/interesting/entertaining the ads are to the audience, the more it can be seen as content, and the lesser the advertiser pays. I am not a Digg user, though I do have an account, but it does remind me of the thumbs up/down concept on Facebook. I have to wonder if Facebook will now release contextual ads in the stream, and use the same mechanism. And then perhaps move to the ‘everyone gets paid’ mechanism that I had mentioned in an earlier post on recommendations.

Meanwhile, on to twitter, the two business models that i read about a few days back were Sponsored Tweets from Izea, (via RWW), to be launched in a month or so; and Super Chirp (via Tech Crunch) that’s already live. Versions of these concepts already exist in the market – Magpie and Twitpub respectively. As per the Adweek article, “Sponsored Tweets .. will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per Tweet.” Izea plans to capitalise on the “built in viral appeal” of Twitter and the sponsored tweets will carry a #spon hashtag. #spon is bound to spawn spam and let’s just say I expect to see #spon trending 😉 Super Chirp is a totally different  concept. As per the site, the mechanism is fairly simple – Super Chirp allows you to “chirp” via direct message to people who pay to “subscribe” to you. If you are a publisher, you can make use of your existing Twitter account, you set the monthly price for your content, users subscribe to your content on the Super Chirp website, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. Super Chirp keeps 30% and you keep the rest. Its obviously a concept worth checking out for celebrities, and those who can give timely, essential info like say, stock tips. Judging by the way people pay for the Rs.30/month VAS items on mobile, I’m sure this can be put to good use. And while the micropayment concept for news has been dissed, I wonder if some news service provider would experiment with this. And why just news providers,  if i were live tweeting from events – ranging from WWDC to the Mumbai blasts, this could at least pay for coffee 🙂

Sponsored Tweets is ‘push’, but the publisher uses his pull among the crowd. Interesting that an advertiser might get negative vibes because of the publisher’s greed. Digg Ads is ‘push’ but rewarding the advertiser if he makes a favourable impression on the crowd.  Super Chirp is ‘pull’ and it’ll be interesting to see how the publishers fare. Of the three, Sponsored Tweets is closest to the advertising we see in traditional media today.  Digg Ads lend some democracy and forces advertisers to be interesting and non intrusive. A step ahead of the Google Ad Sense model, I’d venture. Super Chirp is more publisher driven, it is like starting from scratch, building an audience based on absolute value delivered – I like the content, I pay for it. Though i hope they have some system for preventing RTs (which would render the subscription model useless) I like the path, like Umair Haque says in this awesome post, “Today, viral economies pass links and messages from person to person. What will they pass tomorrow — cars, jobs, houses?”

In all of this, even Sponsored Tweets because I trust the system to correct ‘evil’, what made me take notice and be a bit happy was that we were moving away from an inventory based advertising set up of fixed time/ad space – pushing advertising, towards creating more value for everyone concerned by involving the end consumer in the process. In many views, I see them as different versions of content marketing. Whether we are seeing a new advertising model, is something time will answer. No, not the magazine silly!! 😉

until next time, add sense 🙂