On social media advertising (and louisgray.com)
I’ve published my first column over at louisgray.com, called Social Media Advertising: Crossing the Streams, thanks much to Louis for the opportunity!
Here’s a quick excerpt:
I think allowing users to vote on ads that they like and have them “bubble up” to the top, social news-style, might be a rather clever addition to the Digg platform. That said, we can imagine that some of Digg’s famously rowdy commenters would be incensed at the prospect of any advertising inserted into an area previously set aside for user generated story submissions.
How incensed is hard to say, but we can look at the reception that ad network Magpie received on Twitter to get an indication. To be fair, Magpie is an independent service – it has no formal affiliation with Twitter – that offers to sell “tweets” on Twitter user profiles. So its revenue model aims to cut microbloggers in on revenue, and not Twitter itself. The reaction thus far from the Twitter community has been pretty negative, and indeed signs are that Magpie is gaining very little traction.
