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PayPerPost is a great new way to lose your credibility as a blogger - the service will pay you to write reviews of new products and services. Advertisers post “opportunities” on the site - they can specify whether the post should have pictures, and even request a positive review. That last part really crosses the line, and it’s sure to destroy any credibility you have as a writer. PayPerPost will pay more if you have a high-trafficked blog, but anyone who has spent time building up an audience would be crazy to take part.
Ted Murphy, the founder of PayPerPost, has actually been at this for a while - his BlogStar Network used to contact bloggers via email and pay them $5 to $10 per post. Positive reviews were encouraged. He sees the new system as a way to streamline the process.
PayPerPost is a terrible, terrible idea and totally unethical. But I know this stuff has been going on for a long time. Every so often, you’ll see a spate of blog comments around the blogosphere that promote certain brands - they call them “buzz” campaigns. Paying for posts is a natural evolution. And while no serious content creators will take them up on the offer, I’m deeply concerned they’ll tap into the long-tail of unethical bloggers, polluting the Google results and fooling unsuspecting readers.
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It's not entirely inaccurate to call the new Netscape (which replaced the old Netscape.com late last night) a "Digg clone," but it's surely not the first. But if I asked you how many other Digg clones are out there, what would you guess? Twenty-five? Fifty? Yeah, more like 200+. Blog 3spots has created a constantly-updated list of the Digg-alikes on dozens of topics and in dozens of different langauges.
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Digg isn’t De.licio.us
Digg, I believe results in less intelligence. The crowd is imitative; there are many followers in this space. De.licio.us, on the other hand, is the result of truly independent choices: it’s simply personal bookmarking, made public. The assumption is that a human will bookmark what is useful to them; making that bookmark public allows others to benefit from your discovery. In contrast, Digg is very supportive of crowd psychology, which can be very dumb, mimicky, and in the end not all that helpful.
Google Is A Very 1.0 Shopping Engine
With the launch of Google Checkout, Google is clearly aiming to be the world’s online shopping engine. The strategy has all the hallmarks of AdWords — Google doesn’t care what you’re looking for, what you find, or where you buy it — so long as Google can make money off of every step of the process.
Here’s the problem with this strategy — from the consumer perspective, Google is not an efficient way to shop online. Google’s blog mentions Starbucks are one of the merchants that signed up for Google Checkout, so let’s try searching for “gourmet coffee.”
There’s nothing wrong with the ads in the search results — each of these gourmet coffee merchants is potentially relevant. The problem is that I have no way to compare them — all I can do is click and browse, click and browse.
Google revolutionized search by leveraging the network effect of hyperlinks to determine relevancy — but the 2.0 efficiencies of page rank are completely missing from AdWords. Sure, advertisers compete on keyword relevance, but I as a consumer am unable to benefit from the network effects of the larger online shopping community. Which of these merchants has the best value proposition for people like me? Where do people like me most often shop? Which has the most relevant products? Which has the best prices?
Navigating Google ads feels like Yahoo circa 1997 — a lot of clicking and browsing in hopes of finding the right fit. The organic search results may be super-relevant, but the “sponsored” results are of limited value because the cost-per-click bids are too big a factor in ranking and there is no information available from my peers. The advertisers are in complete control. The ads are relevant to a degree, and certainly more relevant than the random interruption of old media models, but as a consumer, I’m still at the mercy of the system. And the return on my attention is marginal at best.
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Is this a fair trade off? I give Google all of my purchase data (what I buy, when I buy, how much I buy) and they use it to benefit me by: 1) offering me the convenience of Checkout; and 2) giving me more advertising that will be more targeted to things I’m potentially interested in (to quote Marshall Kirkpatrick “Minority Billboards”). And you know what Google gets? They get to jack up their ad rates, charging bigger dollars to the companies that have to pay to reach you because you might buy what they are selling. I’m pretty sure Google has done the math here and fully expects their increased ad rates to outweigh the cost of the Checkout service. And you, as the end consumer will have no idea what that increase will be because Google’s advertising market isn’t transparent.
At Jellyfish, we don’t think this is a fair trade off. Targeted ads are nice, but the ad’s Google will likely show you are from the advertisers that paid the most to get to you (Just because company X outbids Company Y to get in front of you at Google doesn’t mean that company X is the most relevant for your needs). And most importantly, you won’t benefit from the competition that is fueled by Google having access to your buying information (or what we would call your historical record of buying intentions).
At the end of the day, I think Google is doing some major free riding on the extreme value you create by allowing them to store and sell off the database of your buying intentions (e.g., your purchase history) to the highest bidding advertisers.
We intend to do this much differently at Jellyfish, because with our VPA advertising we always share back at least half of the advertising dollars that a merchant pays for your attention (both historical buying intention and present intention to buy when you search for a product at our site). Thus, anytime a merchant pays more to get your attention at Jellyfish, you will get a direct, tangible benefit in the form of lower prices. It’s the way we hope to show consumers that when it comes to their buying activity and attention, there is a better way.
I tried downloading some flash with with Flashget but it was not as intuitive as I exepcted it to be.
