Four Click Freedom

I was thinking yesterday, ‘who should pay?’  Basically a website that I work with will post the advertisers banner on their site.  This website is promising performance and marketability from their site to the advertiser.  They are promising it is a good place to put an ad.

Well if I can improve the effectiveness of their ads on their site by being an agent between the advertiser and the admin, ‘who’s side am I on?’  By allowing three more clicks to the click-through process, ‘should the advertiser pay the same price for each and every click?’ And if so, ‘do i make a cut from each click?’

Or, ‘should the advertiser pay me to make their ads more effective?’  But as I stated before the Clickboard is free for everyone to make.  I make my money when the Clickboard has my icon on it, and eventually connects the Clickboard to my site.  Here the advertiser does have to pay me to be incorporated into my site, depending on the depth and presence they want on my site, and how focused the targeting is for the users on my site.

Back to the question.  The advertiser pays me for my icon, ‘but who makes the money on all those clicks?’  Are my ads no more valuable for the admin than regular banners, and if so, should he charge more if an advertiser wants to put a Clickboard on his site?

I hope so!

When you see all the worry warts and their efforts to make the internet privacy part of the experience and warn everyone about how they are being targeted, you can really see where I might start to worry.  I too would like to help facilitate marketers in targeting an audience on the Internet.

I believe what I am doing is much different than what is on the market, especially what is hyped up to be the next big thing like Feeva.  Targeting based on bla is still bla, I don’t care how big of a computer you have.  If people aren’t going to actually give you information and you are only going to take the scraps that they leave you or the bits and pieces that the Internet commissioner says you can legally use without having Internet users getting their hair standing on in, then how can you say you are the best behavioral targeting genius that is on this side of the hill?  Well you can’t, and that is what I have been discovering.  This not so new term called behavioral targeting is really a bunch of hoopla and it’s making a lot of people worried just because of the terminology.

I do agree with the part that you have to let people know what you are doing and saying how the information is used.  But if you actually create a platform where people get to tell you how they want the information used, haven’t you saved the people from going into tale-spins worrying about who sees what and what they know?

By giving the user options and control over their information is the real key.  Instead of people running in circles wondering how you are you going to use the information from late last night when they were searching for a honey on the Internet to target them, you should actually give them a choice about how they want to be profiled.  Ask them a question!  Say hey I saw you man, what are you up to, I know this isn’t your market and it doesn’t have anything to do with who you are, but even though you are here, what kind of information can you provide, your age, how many friends you have on Facebook, you like to party, you really keep to yourself and are pretty simple, what would be the one thing you would tell me if I knew you looked here?  I’m going to use it to get rid of all the crappola that surrounds your surfing habits now and give you something that might make a little more sense to your life.

Maybe this is th only way to get information out of people.  But the main purpose is say I will not give you more crap based on your habits, I will give you something you want me to, but to do so you have to reveal who you are in one little bit.   Much like twitter, would you be afraid to twitter as to what you are doing late this one night?  Maybe you won’t tell me exactly but that little tweet would be enough to change your experience and what is then given to you in return.  Something much more in line with who you are.

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Facebook and Google are scary.  In this time of economic downturn it is no time for hustlers. When information is at stake, security is a key component to peoples trust and when you abuse this, we could start fighting a long uphill battle in the months to come.

My example here is with advertising. People are still going to have to spend money to get back on top and get their businesses back up and running. The first cuts in budgetary plans are usually at the advertising budgets. But these are also the first to be replaced.

Many people these days are wondering where to put their ad dollars. Print media is said to be dying. Everything is apparently going online, and why not, you really get more specific information that way. But what about the targeting of these ad dollars and the amount you pay. This is starting to create real concern. Google is running a monopoly and adjusting prices based on ‘falsification’ of Adwords’ performance. And sites that have over a million visitors a month are getting the rod because they have to put ads on their sites that only pay them when they get clicked on, greatly devaluing their site.

The real scare comes in when Google and Facebook hide certain critical points that concern your rights in their ‘terms of use.’ By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. Facebook recently said the same thing.

This selling of personal information for any use under the sun is not what I intended when I signed up for these programs. With Facebook I get to choose my friends and who sees my photos and stories. Now that Mr. Matt Zuckerberg says any advertiser can buy anything on my profile, it doesn’t feel quite as private. That is pretty scary to one day run across myself in some book about people in Tianjin.

I for one am not using Facebook anymore. I have had about enough of it anyway and only get on 30 seconds a day to read the feed. Google I am attached to still though. I am even thinking to get the new Google phone. But there is a difference.

Google is an ad agency and they use the information themselves. There is no need for them to sell off their inventory; it does more good in their own hands. As for them being a monopoly, that is probably true, but at least I can still get my mail.

So what about Clickboards.net?….

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WujWuj will assuredly fail like everything else similar because they require so much interaction for a product, too much hunting, and everyone always wants the lower price.

Solution, offer the rebate later.  Go ahead and shop buy anything you want and share what you bought, brag about it, get others interested, but don’t wait for the savings.

With your online account tracking your history, anyone in your network, according to your setting of filters and privacy, can review some of the favorite items you’ve saved on or bought lately.  If they are interested too, they can go get it.  Say one hundred people in your network bought Super Bowl memorabilia for full price, well according to WujWuj, if they had bought it through their group buying, they would have all saved 20% if they waited and bought together.  Well you are still a group and you all still bought the same stuff, so why not still get the savings.  This is possible if you offer the savings later after the purchases have been made.

You can still promote the things you buy and attract more people to your purchases, thus still taking action, and therefore still applicable towards recieving savings.