I have recently been thinking about better ways to do advertising within social media sites. The following is a concept I am thinking out and would love some input on.
Building up this idea, I would point out that I believe there is a huge market for ’solution apps’ that reside within the development framework of a system. For example, the company SquareTrade is partnered with eBay and offers online dispute resolution services (ODR). Just think how many social media sites need a solution for dispute resolution and why ’reinvent the wheel’ when you already have a great solution in the marketplace? SquareTrade just needs to make itself better known and potentially offer better developer integration. SquareTrade could then charge a licensing fee, or somehow monetize an API that developers would integrate based on use (more like a PayPal model).
My concept. Google already offers the ability for any site to integrate Adsense, that is ads that becomes ’targeted’ based on keyword content (text) shown on a particular screen. However, this isn’t really ’targeted’ at all to a user because I may be reading about Baseball, but in terms of consumerism, I may actually be in the market for a new tennis racket’ I just happen to be reading about baseball.
My solution would be an API that embeds into social media sites and allows users to pick what types of ads they want to see. When you login, if you are going to be forced to look at ads, you might as well look at stuff you’d be interested in. Well, instead of guessing what a user might want, why not ask them? You only need to answer once (type in the keywords of stuff you might buy) and then those are your default ads. If you want to change your ads, then you go into your preferences tab and select new keywords, or perhaps images. For companies looking to advertise, they only pay out based on clicks ’“ like Adwords.
I think with some more refinement this could be a killer app. There are even awesome integration possibilities with TailGate, a company I see as revolutionary, and whom I would invest in over Facebook any day.