Adding User Voting to Online Advertising

As our clients know, we’re pretty sceptical about online advertising. Contextual keyword ad programs like Google AdWords work great, but we generally discourage most other programs.
Seth Godin announced Squidoo’s new variation on the online a–the SquidOffer:

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don’t pay for the clicks.

We’ve signed Capulet up to give it a try (it looks like the program actually goes live on Monday). We assembled a page of our best web marketing articles and then wrote a (hopefully) clever, informal ad for it. We’ll see how it goes.

Tags: web marketing, online advertising, cpc, squidoo, AdWords, Web-20