This article immediately follows on from the previous articles on
"Search" that were inspired from a talk at DomainFest by author John Battelle.
For the past few years one of my businesses has been working on this very problem. We developed a system that delivers content that users have requested directly to their desktops. This solution primarily used RSS feeds to solve the massive content scale and provided levels of customer interaction. For example, users could vote on each RSS channel as to whether they thought it was any good or not, thereby providing feedback for other users on the quality of each channel being added.
The business model was developed from our experience with domains and involved inserting PPC advertisements between RSS content. This generated some money but not the massive amounts that we had initially hoped for. Ultimately where we wanted to head was in behavioural or psychographical targeting of advertisements to meet the specific needs of each individual user. This level of customization is tantalizingly close to our grasp.
After a number of years of working on and off the project we decided to shelve it for a time as other developmental priorities and opportunities became available. I envisage that it won't be long until we get back to testing other solutions to crack this tough nut!
The single biggest challenge that we experienced in developing the dialogue/database system was building something that users enjoyed. Even though a system works it doesn't necessarily mean that people will use it. The conclusion that we came to was that dialoguing takes time and people are time poor. This doesn't mean that we've completed given up on experimenting with the concept, on the contrary, more thought is going into it each day.
I personally believe that John Battelle was right in promoting a dialogue with customers but our experience doing this on a massive scale across multiple market verticals is not a trivial exercise. I do believe that once solved it could potentially transform our industry.
For example, let's imagine that you have a domain that receives 100 users per day and that 1% of them sign-up for a database driven "dialoging service". At day 100 you have exactly 100 users in the service and still 100 potentially new users coming to your domain each day. At day 200 you have 200 users in the database and 100 to the domain. It's not long before you realize that if you could monetize those users at the same rate as the domain then you'll be in the money in a major way.
Here are a few other side benefits. You could sell your domain at some point and live off the revenue from the users. This is like having your cake and eating it to! Trademark infringing domains could throw off users which are now no longer infringing on the trademark. This is like "laundering money" except you are now "laundering users". Clean users from potentially dirty traffic.
If anyone is interested in talking to me about our experiences in what we have developed to date then please don't hesitate to contact me. In the meantime, I think that I might listen to John's book once again. Nothing like being challenged in the thinking!
Articles in the series:
Search and John Battelle - Part 1 - The Inspiration,
Search and John Battelle - Part 2
Amazon Link to Book:
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Source: Posted by Michael Gilmour — Original post on on
Whizzbangsblog — March 3, 2008
