Jeremiah Owyang

How Microsoft Can Win The PC/Mac Campaign

For the last few months, er years, Microsoft has been getting their assets handed to them as Apple tears into their brand with the “PC vs Mac” clever ads.

Microsoft has launched a new campaign with at least two phases, the first one showing Seinfeld and Gates acting as “normal guys” at the mall, at home, on the road. Most tech heads didn’t get it, but for the mainstream everybodies, it may have resonated. The ads may have been stalled, the reports contradict.

The second phase, which launched last night, extends the “everybody is a PC” theme shows some highly structured actors (including the lovely Eva Longoria) showing how they’re a PC.

I figured out that the theme was “everyone is a PC” which is a differentiator from the elite feeling of Mac for young urban 20 something year olds, to the rest of the business and work world.

So what could Microsoft (And their agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky) do to resonate and win this campaign? Allow anyone to publish their photos, videos how they are a PC. They currently have these features in their campaign site, (link via Andrew Finkle) but they are buried a few clicks away, and they even require a fan to submit their age.

What should Microsoft do?

Create YouTube Video Templates that have the same video start and end (called bumpers) and have a seperate MP3 track that can be added in the background

Create a set of tags “ImaPC” or “PCpride” or “everyonePC” that makes the videos easy to find

Next, aggregate the videos onto one page, making them easy for folks to find.

Create a voting campaign allowing users to add points to the videos they enjoy the most

Use these user created videos in actual TV and web advertising

Allow negative videos to be included, and showcase these on the web

Elevate these social features right on the campaign page, expand to Facebook, LinkedIn, and where else creators and joiners exist.

To take the win, Microsoft should let the people lead, create, and own the campaign, Jerry and Bill can share the spotlight, reframe the campaign on creators. I see there site is hinting at this, and it maybe in their plans, but I’d expect them to crank this user created feature up.

If you agree that Microsoft should elevate the opportunity for everyone to show how they are a PC, leave comment below, maybe, just maybe, they’re watching.

Update: Microsoft is putting the ads on Times Square in NYC, a good start –but don’t forget to republish across the web. (link via Paisano)

Update 2: Dennis McDonald did a “Worldle” analysis (Tag cloud) of all the words used in the following comments. What’s being screamed? “Campaign, people, PC, microsoft, pc, mac”

What Facebook’s New ‘Engagement Advertising’ Means to Brands

Update: Only a few brands will trial these new ads, after testing, will then be broadly released later in the year.

A few days ago, I had a private briefing before the press with Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization at Facebook, below are the findings, with specific recommendations for brands. As I get more information, such as results and data, I’ll update this post.

Unlike Beacon or Facebook Connect, both products intended to aggregate the actions on third-party sites (like Blockbuster.com) this new product called “Engagement Advertisements” is intended to nicely integrate with Facebook’s newly redesign profile and news pages. Early brands to trial this include: Paramount Pictures whose video commenting for Tropic Thunder ran two weeks ago –I’ve asked for campaign results. Future early adopters also include General Mills’ Betty Crocker which will have image commenting and the ability to ‘fan’, and video commenting for Addias, both to trial late August.

Engagement Ads provide three unique experiences
Rather than clicking on the ad and being whisked away to a branded microsite, these ads allow members to stay within the contained walls of Facebook and their social community. Engagement ads come in three major flavors:

1) Comment Style Ad: Members can now leave comments on these advertisements, much like wall posts. Brands that are focused on entertainment, new product rollouts, autos and apparel are well suited. The ad can show up to 4 comments per object, and the activity spreads to the users newsfeed.

2) Virtual Gifts Style Ad: Brands can now create virtual items that users can share, spread to each other. This wildly popular behavior within applications and Facebook is suitable for consumer products, entertainment, and some media.

3) Fan Style Ad: A play off the Facebook pages, users with a persona affinity for a product (like Apple) can become a fan, triggering a notification to their network, and could then tie on social ads. Will work great for established brands, like guitar hero, passion products, luxury products, or any brand with a rabid customer base.

Common Behaviors of Youth on Social Networks
See what my friends are up to: 86%
Sent a message to someone: 79%
Posted/updated my profile: 70%
Looked at profiles of people I didn’t know: 65%
Sources: North American Technographics Retail And Marketing Online Youth Survey, Q4 2007, Forrester Research

This youth data supports that social network behavior is in fact, ‘social’ and these respondents are not seeking to find out about product information, nor learn about the latest products at a media site, product review, or a search engine like Google.

Knowing that the use case between social networks and product-focused sites is key for marketers to deploy successful marketing. For success, marketers and advertisers need to focus in on the key social behaviors, and integrate the marketing activities within the community.

Engagement Ads: (new, and detailed above) allow community members to interact with the ads in the profile and newsfeeds –without leaving the Facebook site, increasing interaction, social spread, and brand engagement. Currently unproven, brands may not be ready for these types of new ads, until they change how they measure success.

Standard Advertisements: These Text and image ads can appear on homepage or profile pages, neatly integrate with the new redesign.

Social ads: Are helpful for brands to increase the velocity or acceleration by marketers, allowing them to buy ads that echo the behaviors “what did my friends do” of opt-in users. These primarily appear on the newsfeed, which will encourage spread to an individuals network. Some brands have been under fire from users who felt this was invasive.

Traditional IAB graphic ads: Advertising laden brands may still purchase the standard IAB skyscraper and banner ads from Microsoft both an investor and partner. With low CTRs, some brands have better places to spend their money for return on investment.

Facebook pages: Launched last year, brands can (at no charge) create their own pages, embed applications, encourage discussions, and start to garner “Fans” of it’s products. Most brands are incorrectly using these, based upon the findings from my recent report on the best and worst of social network marketing for 2008 -Forrester Research.

Event Feature: based pages allow marketers to promote events through viral invites, rsvp tools, and event rollups from media and community interaction. While a useful utility, for most brands that market on the web, this is often a side-effort, not the primary push.

Facebook Connect: Perhaps the biggest untold story is the day when Facebook (and other social networks) will connect with corporate websites, I’ve outline future scenarios in this post What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites.

Applications: Facebook was afirst mover to allow third-party developers to create an entire eco-system of applications that are growing their own applications. Most brands are harassing successful apps through sponsorships, cross branding, and a few are building their own apps, see how Dell was able to let the community create –and spread– ads on their behalf. Also read my posts on Widget strategies to learn more, or my overview of Facebook’s F8 Developers Community.

To Succeed, Brands Must Learn Social Marketing
While costly, risky, and foreign to brands, the biggest missed opportunity for brands in social networks is to become part of the community, interact and build real relationships. Although we should expect interaction rates and viral spread to increase with engagement ads, brands should wait and see how these ads CTR perform. For those brands that are ready to forgo the risk, and pursue ‘Engagement Ads’ they should:

Be community themed: Ads created by the brand will succeed if the content is first focused on the needs of the community.

Rely on new interaction activities: The rules of the game have changed, the goal is to increase interaction within the community –not pull them offsite.

Approach with an Integrated Mix: Facebook offers many tools, ‘Engagement Ads’ shouldn’t go it alone, instead increase chances of success by involving other tools.

Change how they measure success: Brands must also change they way the measure success with these interactive ads, rather than weigh success solely on page views or referral traffic.

Marriage of Widgets and Advertisements offshoot: “WidgetAds”
Looking forward, this announcement helps to set in place how online marketing will start to evolve. Widgets have already become advertising units, and now these advertisements are starting to become widgets. Expect Engagement ads, and Widgets created by third parties to start to exhibit these behaviors outside of Facebook. Facebook Connect, Google Connect, and OpenID will bridge social graphs with interactive ads –springing forth a new generation of widgetads.

Although innovative, Facebook must focus on marketers
Although pushing interactive marketing, Facebook must hand-hold many brands with their frequently changing marketing offerings. Facebook must develop a client solution that will help optimize these tools with professional services based on data, results, and demographic information. Marketers can’t afford to experiment with their brand without the help of a trained and experienced group of social marketers provided by the platform.

The only caveat being that the experience of users, always, always comes first, I’ll point to others that cover this aspect.

This is cross-posted on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing blog

See all posts tagged Social Networks, Widgets, Facebook, or my weekly digest

Forrester Report: The Best and Worst of Social Network Marketing for 2008

Forrester Report: Online Community Best Practices

Forrester Report: Online Communities: Build Or Join?

Forrester Report: Google’s OpenSocial: Good News For Marketing Widgets But No Silver Bullet

Forrester Report: Get With It With Widgets

As usual, the conversation spirals off into Friendfeed.

Update: Forrester clients can access a short brief with additional recommendations for interactive marketers.

Letting your Community Create your Advertisements

A few months ago, I covered Dell’s Green campaign called “Regeneration” which allowed community members to create their own art themed “green” and they were then given the opportunity to vote on which one was best. They turned over much of the marketing control to the community, while they become more of an enablement platform, rather than ‘forcing’ a message down their throat.

They’ve taken the next step by assembling some of the winning drawings and created an emebeddable flash player that shows the art work being created in time-lapse style. Yes, you can see how the engaged community of artists hand drew each of these ads. As I understand it, they are not paid, this is voluntary, in hopes of some prizes, and perhaps more importantly, recognition.

What could Dell do to take this to the next level? Integrate these final drawings in many different areas of the Regeneration campaigns, including TV ads, theme designed laptops and computers, and ultimately having a community created marketing department that spreads to other product lines.

James Gross of Federated Media, a social media interactive and conversational agency, had initially posted this on his blog.

Many Forms of Widget Monetization

Although there are many forms of Web Monetization (I’ve listed out nearly 15 forms), the newest iteration of web marketing: widgets, haven’t yet fully cashed in.

Widget, Gadgets, Applications, Canvas Pages, Embeds, it goes on and one. One thing is clear, the rate of widgets continues to increase, take for example Facebook’s application platform has over 15,000, 20,000 applications in just about 9 months. Granted, many of those are slightly tweaked clones of each other, the top 100 widgets clearly has adoption.

In some cases, there are sophisticated companies developing widgets, the RockYou’s and Slides of the world can really zero in and focus, or take the garage developers such as the two Russian developers who created Scrabulouos, or lastly, the big corporations or interactive firms that are getting in on the action –often with limited success.

Yet, how do we monetize widgets? There’s only a few ways, some tied back to traditional methods, and some leaning on the new media.

Advertising/Sponsorship: CPM models sit nicely here, yet research indicates that users don’t go to social networks for finding products, CTRs are pretty damn low. Why? because people go there to socialize and self-exprsess, not find products, (that’s what Google, eBay, Craigslist is for). Banner ads count too, such as this case study with Vampires and Sony.

Interactive Marketing: Some widget developers are selling their already existing application space to large brands, who can insert this branded engagement into an existing community. Take for example Dell’s regeneration campaign case study.

Branded Entertainment: Somewhat different than advertising and interactive marketing, popular media or widgets can be put forth from funding from large companies, while we’ve yet to see this occur, Intel comes to mind: they sponsored a feature on Digg, and paid for the development, all in the context of their brand.

Cost Per Install: I personally think this is a dangerous way to monetize, although I realize the top widget networks are getting sizable revenues from selling the opportunity for other applications to piggy back off their success, and sell installations. If everyone does this, we’re going to end up with an excess of applications installed, based upon lower value. I somehow imagine successful widgets should grow naturally and organically, not sold from a mercenary application.

Acquisition: No brainer here, but folks like Scrabulous (if they weren’t shut down) could sell of their application to an interactive firm or widget network and all the community members that come with them.

eCommerce: Surprisingly, we’ve not seen any great applications spur forth with adoption in social networks, it just isn’t happening yet, expect to see an existing eCommerce site to create a successful widget by end of year, and likely a new form of social shopping to appear. Update: Rodney is watching this new type of ‘classified’ widget Radical Buy make some traction.

Lead Generation
Techcrunch profiles how some application developers such as OfferPal are able to view ads, collect user information and send them to marketers for lead generation. Specific numbers have yet to be published in public.

Now if I’ve missed any forms of widget monetization, do leave a comment. Also, see the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008.

Crowd Sourcing your Brand: How the Data Portability Group leans on the Community to design, vote and reward it’s new logo

Turning over the logo creation to your community
For a few years now, we’ve been saying that the brand is really owned by your customers, not your MarCom brand police team. Today, we’re seeing this actually play out in a very interesting twist.

The Data Portability Workgroup launches
The Data Portability group is a workgroup focused on building industry-wide standards for information to safely and freely pass from one site to another –all at the control of an individual user. Yes, I know we’re all sick of seeing yet another working group with little or no results, but this group appears to be making progress, I’m reviewing their status reports, and will probably be briefed by Chris at major milestones.

Logo infringement a cause for redesign
Recently, they launched and announced themselves, including the easy to remember figure 8/infinity sign. Apparently, this was too similar to the logo of Fedora, While copyright infringement is never a fun thing, what’s interesting is that the DataPortability group is crowd sourcing their logo design to the community.

The community designs, votes, and is rewarded
There are hundreds of dollar worth of prizes, ad exposure on Techcrunch and CenterNetworks, and iPhone and other goodies, read the full guidelines on Chris’s site.

The logos will be submitted on spec to the team and a ‘representative election’ will occur:

“The co-founders of the DataPortability project, along with the steering group, will make a short list. We will then provide a web-based voting system for the community to make the final choice.”

Letting go to gain more
This is really an interesting way to let the community create, decide, and take ownership over your own brand and logo. Let’s see how this turns up. To add to the reward, I’ll point to the winning designer, granting even additional exposure. Great job Chris and team, turning a potential lawsuit into a community involving event, I look forward to seeing the results.

Remembering the Many Opportunities of Social Media –not just the Impacts of Advertising

Social Media impacts every aspect of our cultures, from business, politics, journalism, media, and advertising. Within just the business realm, it impacts research, marketing, support, product development and employees within the firewall. Despite the vast impacts of this shift “power has shifted from large organizations to individual participants” as humans connect with other humans, we often forget to see the larger picture.

Aaron Wall is someone I respect, he is certainly a domain expert in search marketing, in his recent post The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing, he gives a perspective –that’s limited from a search marketers perspective –is bearish on social media marketing. Several people asked me to blog my responses, so here it is:

[Social media marketing has it's challenges, yet success should not be measured on 'search marketing' alone]

Social media has many problems on it’s own (and I’ll frequently point them out) but we should remember that while search monetization is a dominant form in our industry, it’s not the only way websites are monetizes, in fact the complete list is here of the many forms of web marketing.

We’re seeing many more cases where marketers don’t want to monetize directly with ads, but would rather be part of a community of dialog with customers, so they can listen to the marketplace and learn. Also, we’re seeing examples where companies want the message about a product to spread (but not from their own mouth) but from word of mouth marketing. Companies like Dell want to build next-generation products using tools like IdeaStorm –where the customers define the product specs –in order to build better.

In each of the above cases, social media is used in a way much more than just search marketing and advertising.

[The greatest opportunities lie where companies be part of communities where ads may not even be present]

So before we suggest that social media marketing is ineffective, we should first look at the bigger picture, and perhaps revisit the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Think bigger my friends. (Update: Steve Rubel is)

Hey Armchair Critics, Rate the SuperBowl ads this Sunday using Twitter “TwitterBowl”

I’ve created MicroMedia events before, this time, I want to frame it as an overlay to the multi million dollar advertising event, the Superbowl.

Are you a superbowl ad critic? Of course you are, everyone is. Even if you don’t watch the superbowl, those pervasive ads will end up in YouTube, Digg, and your cousins blog and your best friends Facebook profile. Tired of others choosing which one was the funniest/stupidist/biggest waste of time? Well this year, you can rate your own superbowl ads using Twitter, and see what everyone else in Twitter thinks too.

There’s just three steps:

1) Sign up: Get a twitter account, got that? Good.

2) Send your vote to @superbowlads: When we’re watching the game in real time, simply send a reply to superbowlads. I created this Twitter account just for this virtual event. Reply to the superbowlads account, name the commerical, and give it a rating of 1-5 stars, 5 being the best.

examples:

“@superbowlads That Pepsi commercial was funny 4 stars”

“@superbowlads The Hillary Clinton advertisement was bunko 2 stars”

“@superbowlads Bud-wise-er, that was so 10 years ago, weak. 1 star”

3) See what others rated: You can then see everyone who’s rated the ads by doing a search on any of the Twitter search tools, I like Terraminds. See this example, it’s showing all the people who have replied to superbowlads.

I’m going to be hanging at Brian Solis’s house (Eric will be there too), we’ll be tweeting the whole time, and I hope the rest of you do. And no, I’m not using this data for anything, it’s just for fun. I may try to tally up the results, but it’s not for anything official, just another way for social media to be an overlay where we take charge, where we control, and where we voice our opinions.

See you on twitterland on Sunday!

Update: There are dozens of messages coming in every few minutes. One respondent said he was tracking them on his mobile and received 677 messages in 30 minutes.

Also, twitter replies seems to be going slowly, I’m using the search tools to get updates.

Update: Chris Heuer did a quick Utterz interview asking me about the purpose of this experiment.

Testing Facebook Pages and $20 worth of SocialAds

It’s about 3am and I got up to test the Facebook SocialAd and Facebook Pages system.

Status of Test
I’ll update this section as I have changes

Nov 7: Created a Web Strategy Facebook page, ran $20 SocialAd requesting people write on my wall.

Nov 8: Social Ads are working. A few people have arrived to the Facebook page from Social Ads, at least 4 people have voiced that from the wall writings. The stats on insight are still not populated (it says it takes 48 hours), 99 Fans now.

Nov 9: The insight dashboard is not displaying any data, although there are a few people who left wall comments that they’ve come from newsfeed (socialads).

Nov 11: The insight dashboard is still not displaying click through rates (CTR) of the social ads, so I can’t give any formal metrics away. I do think that it’s likely under 5%. There were a handful of folks that came to the site from social ads, but certainly not the majority, which came from blogs, twitter, and other incoming links (Scoble).

Creating a Facebook Page easy, segmentation detailed
I created a Facebook Page for the “Web Strategy by Jeremiah” brand and was pleased to see there were filters for people (they call them celebrities) and I was able to filter to “Writers”. Analysts are professional writers, and part of why I was hired is because of this blog, so I’m qualified.

Adding details to give color
Creating the page was easy, much like creating a profile, I added a few basic blurbs about the brand, where it’s located, and interests. I uploaded the graphic banner. I tweeted the experience, and within minutes had a few fans. I tested the ‘message all’ product to the three people in the group. I also added an event, promoting the Barcelona Blogger Dinner I’m co-hosting next week. Finally I added a discussion board and asked “How can the Web Strategy Blog improve” (feel free to give honest feedback, even if critical). Of course, I added my masthead photo, which also embodies the brand, and my ugly mug as a profile picture.

$20 test of SocialAd: Highly targeted
I learned this from Charlene Li, who recently tested Facebook flyers. I aimed for and the text reads “Web Strategy Blog Readers This is really a test of the F Pages and Fan systems” and has my picture on it. The ad systems would not let me have the word “Facebook” in it, interesting.

The targeting system is very targeted, here’s what I selected:

Targeting: You are targeting people between 18 and 65 years old in the United States who like blogging, marketing, or web design.
Social Actions

This ad will display with social actions from: (This is the part everyone is concerned with)
* Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Locations
This ad will display in the:
* News Feed
* Ad Space

In the ad, I requested people to write on my wall, I wanted to be more specific, but there’s not a lot of real estate.

Insight Dashboard
Although there’s no data yet, the dashboard has some pretty sophisticated tracking and graphing tools, I’m sure others will post some screenshots, so I’m not going to worry about it now.

Community Responses: Approvals and Rejections
So far, a few people have become Fan-Sumers, there’s about 8 fans of just an hour of deployment. Many of them saw it from my Tweets, and most I already know.

Warning: Corporate Facebook Pages
I also created a Facebook page for Forrester, but did not publish it yet. Why? Because a corporation should have a strategy before using tools, and I haven’t developed one for this specific tool. Please, before you rush in and create a Facebook page for your company, consider the overall strategy, and use the POST methodology that we prescribe: People, Objectives, Strategy, and then finally Technology.

Analysis: Will update in Real Time
I’ll update this post as the test continues to run, and then will eventually do some analysis, pow-wow with Charlene and then explain HOW TO use these tools most effectively.

Nov 07: So far, the process went smoothly, and since it’s self-service many people can get in on the game.
Nov 08: Overall, I’m starting to see how this could help companies, still in ‘analysis mode’

ok, now back to bed

Web Strategy: The Many Forms of Monetization using the Web

You: A Web Strategist
You’re an individual who is responsible for the long term direction of a website, and meets the requirements of business, community, and technology. Part of your role is to keep your website profitable, even if it doesn’t generate direct revenue streams.

Situation
As you plan out the direction of your website, there are multiple ways to bring your web strategy to fruition, I’m listing out these methods below.

The Many Forms of Monetization using the Web:

Advertising
The most common form of monetization for websites is Advertising, it works great for media sites, blogs, and other news and media sites. For the corporate web strategist, their goal is to get ads on these sites. ConversionRater has listed out the many forms of advertising including:

Contextual Advertising

Display Advertising

Targeted Advertising

Text Link Advertising

Sponsorship
I’m calling this out as separate than advertising as often sponsors are infused into website or media as part of the experience. One example that often comes to mind is the infusion of the ScobleShow and Seagate brand. Robert mentions the brand uses the products, and displays the logo on a variety of media he creates. Please note I’m a former employer employee of PodTech, so here’s a few other examples: Chris Pirillo’s live stream show is sponsored by Dell and others, a perfect fit. Recently, Ask a Ninja of Federated Media created some customer shows to promote blades of steel, a cross over and viral marketing campaign.

Paid Content and Advertorials
Often in magazines and newspapers we’ll see advertorial sections that –at first glance– appear to be editorial of the publication. These paid content areas likely have useful or valuable knowledge being shared, but at the same time will guide the user towards a marketing direction. Media websites can offer these advertorial sections to their websites, allowing marketers to publish content. Transparency is required, don’t even think of trying to slip one over your users, as when they find out (they always do) a rebellion will occur.
Thanks Andy Beard via comments

Syndication of Content
By repurposing content from other channels, or displaying your content on other websites can result in residual revenue in micropayments or fixed pricing. Displaying content feeds from other sources can result in content providers paying money to the provider.

Affiliations
For many websites, providing recommended links to partners can be steady stream of links and revenue from commission. Amazon’s book recommendations program is an example of this. It’s important that the website be fully transparent about the relationship of the linking and recommendations. Companies that aggregate content and distribute to other companies can receieve a micro-payment for such activities, for example: Mozilla’s Firefox generates regular amounts of micro-payments from users that use their search bar in the top right on the browser.

Donations
I put this under the Marketing bucket as the same types of activities are required to obtain donations from groups or individuals. This common method requests money be given to a cause, in return goodwill is shared from recognition (or badges to be placed on website) tax benefits, or knowing that one has supported something they believe in.

Conversion
Not all websites make direct revenue, although Marketers can bring prospects closer to the sales point. In some companies, those that bring qualified leads get paid, a dollar amount is defined for those leads. Websites can generate interests from marketing activities, contact sheets, qualification activities that eventually result in sales. Although indirect, don’t overlook this powerful form of revenue generation.

Financial
For many web strategists and founders, this is considered the ‘exit strategy’. Although not listed directly, long term monetization and steady revenue growth is often a method to grow.

Acquisition
The most talked about for today’s startup is the opportunity to get purchased by a large web entity. A few come to mind Flickr, Mybloglog, Upcoming > Yahoo, Measuremap, Google Analytics, Blogger > Google, MySpace > Newscorp, and others. Most notably the sale of YouTube to Google for $1.5 billion is a good indicator of an exit. This also includes domain squatting.

Initial Public Offerings
More common in the first web wave (I used to be at Exodus) IPOs are a company’s way to sell ownership of it’s company to the open public, these purchasers became shareholders, and eventually the value of the shares (and company) would increase. The founders and employees maintained a significant share of the company in which they eventually (hopefully) would sell and profit. This form of monetization has greatly tapered off in 2007, being very rare.

Investment and Partnership
Seen more frequently, and maybe not a direct form of long term revenue streams, many startups are receiving waves of funding from venture capital firms, or large partners. From Seed/Angel, A Round, B Round and partnership money we’re seeing these opportunities. Three year old Facebook recently received over $250 Million from advertising partner Microsoft. Although often not counted as ‘monetization’ methods, it truly keeps those who are running the site working, the lights on, and opportunities for growth.

Services
Key for ongoing revenue generation, websites that offer value added services to it’s users will grow.

Ecommerce
Brought to our attention during the first web phase, the “brick to click” mantra became talked about at many traditional retailer stores and has now solidified on many corporate websites, and etailers. Selling online goods, and providing recommendations to them provides and opportunity for the seller to either profit from selling their own goods, or a wholesaler or middleman to take a cut from the transactions.

Premium, Memberships, and Licensing
Common for websites that offer free service, feature-ladden exclusive memberships will provide users with additional benefits. A few examples include mail services offering additional storage, flickr offering more photo upload capacity, or access to other websites. This could also include software licensing options and white labels. (saw this from Brian’s list)

Virtual goods
Not to be overlooked, this form of monetization is growing steadily on Social Networks and Virtual websites. Objects (real and virtual) connotate value and meaning from the giver to the receiver, and can have a monetary value assigned. I’ve outlined the value of virtual goods, do not disregard.

Corollary Benefits
These are revenues that are generated as an outcome from the website itself. Based upon the feedback I’ve received from Twitter and in the comments, there’s some additional revenue opportunities.

Selling Data
Many websites collect information that can be resold to third parties. Data types could be: web traffic, search terms, registration information, email information. Please be open and transparent to your users when collecting information if this is your intention.

Secondary Opportunities
Opportunities to extend a brand into other mediums can generate revenue. In particular new jobs, speaking opportunities, writing opportunities, and syndication of content.

Was this post helpful? Read the other posts tagged Web Strategy. Have any additions? Don’t agree with my taxonomy? I wanna know. Leave a comment and talk back!