Inspired by the 1000 Suns Tumblr Theme, created by Sujay Thomas. I have ported it over to wordpress. The theme is very lightweight and shouldn’t require much customization other than un-commenting the sidebar in footer.php if you would like to include a sidebar on your blog. Enjoy.
You can download it here
With the recent announcement from google about opening up re-targeting through adwords and plenty of venture money flowing into re-targeting companies, there is little doubt that ad re-targeting works.
“The conversion rate is similar to paid search,” he says of Criteo’s retargeted display ads. Retargeted ads are typically clicked on four times more than a traditional run-of-site banner ad, he estimates.
This is all well and good, but when I going to be able to re-target the visitors to my competition?
e.g If I am Target.com, I can re-target visitors across the web who have visited BestBuy.com and offer them a competing offer on a product they have viewed at BestBuy.com or a coupon for $$ off their order.
Best Buy will not be pleased that the data they are sharing to power their own re-targeting campaign is being used against them, but the end user benefits with a better price, and net sales are increased as a result, creating a win for both the merchant (who makes the sale, the user and the advertising network).
Fred Wilson (AVC) wrote a thought provoking piece the other day about how affiliate marketing undervalues the link.
So, in two days, that blog post generated 535 views of the Amazon page and 40 purchases. The affiliate fees associated with those 40 purchases add up to $6.50.
But those 535 views are pretty valuable. Those 535 clicks translated into a total of 118 orders in the past two days, including a Kindle. The total affiliate fees associated with those 535 clicks were $25.20.
But even including all the commerce that was generated from that link, that $25.20 is a cost per click of roughly 5 cents. I think that’s low for a bunch of reasons.
The post inspired some interesting conversation around how in a perfect world, each player in the chain of purchasing-intent generating events e.g blogs, social media pundits all the way to affiliate marketers should be compensated in some way, as opposed to the way affiliate links function now, where only the last attribution is compensated.
Inspired by the post, I decided to construct my own experiment in recommendation commerce to see if I could influence anyone to buy a product through an affiliate link, answering questions on Aardvark. I decided to only present an affiliate link as an answer when it was relevant to the question being asked, and after a series of un-monetizable questions, I was presented with the following.
The book I recommended was Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior (notice affiliate code in link again).
Notice how my answer was hyper-relevant to the question being asked of me. I would guess that in any other scenario, my affiliate link given as an answer would not have been treated with such gratitude. Also of note is the added benefit of my referral, Aaron purchased another two books, sweetening my take by $1.98.
Does this form of monetization scale? Maybe. Does it make sense at such a small one-to-one level? Probably not.
Therefore, I think it remains to be seen, which model (if any) is waiting to be unearthed to monetize the value that is generated in the form of social reviews and recommendations, but it is an interesting space, and one that I will be keeping my eye on.
Much ballywho is often made over the promise of micro-payment or “tipping” flavored monetization models online. The consensus view is that if you can just crack the code and lower the barrier enough for tipping to become dead-simple, then the floodgates of donations will start pouring in. A more bleak (but realistic) view is outlined in an article over at MonetizeThis. In the real world you get tipped when you make eye contact. A bigger crowd doesn’t always mean more tips. Tipping creates price uncertainty. Why pay for something that’s free?
A scary thought experiment…
Wikipedia is entirely supported by donations. So why isn’t it a good model for everyone else? Last year they raised $6.2 million from 125,000 donors. While that’s a lot of money and more than covers their operating budget for the year, Wikipedia gets 190 million visitors a day. Think about that for a second, one of the most import information sources in human history with daily traffic bigger than most nations only got 125,000 donors? How much is one of Wikipedia’s 5 billion monthly visitors worth when it comes time to donate? $.00124. That’s a fraction of a penny. If you’re providing a human experience enriching service on par with Wikipedia, multiply your total audience size by $.00124 to figure out how much you can expect to make from donations. That comes to about 8 million people to stay above the poverty level ($10,000). Wikipedia’s efforts worked well enough, but it’s a frightening proposition for anyone who doesn’t one of the most trafficked websites on the planet.