Social media platforms of all sizes suffer from a common problem: generating income. While venture capital continues to breathe life into twitter, as the U.S. economy tanks, it’s only a matter of time before developing a self-sustaining business model becomes critical.
One new entry into the monetization game, hailing from Sydney, Australia, is ut.ag. I was contacted by one of the founders earlier this week and quickly engaged in a discussion.
Background
uTag is a turnkey system that allows content producers (site owners, bloggers, twitterers, etc) to generate revenue and retain attention from every outbound link. It’s dead simple, quick and non-committal and can be implemented link by link or or a site-wide basis within a few minutes. uTag automatically generates contextual advertising for your outbound links using the major online advertising networks.
Details
Approach: Framed-ad delivery
Payment: via Paypal
Use: URL shortener and javascript widget that can be deployed in a blog/Web site. These are classified as vanilla and cherry flavors (or flavours).
Initial thoughts
To be fair to the guys at ut.ag, this is a beta and likely has more tweaks before it is publicly available. I tried the service with several URLs: a climate change practice at a large, international law firm, BMW USA and the home page of uber-foodie Andrew Zimmern. The results?
- Two of the three Web sites properly displayed in the delivery frame. BMW gave me a browser compatibility message, no doubt crafted by Web developers who don’t like such framing.
- All ads were delivered from Google, but the content was the same each time (all for Utah, go figure)
Summary
Given the (growing) level of noise online, will such a monetization approach pay off? One post by someone who viewed this service at a start-up workshop noted a range of responses. My exchange with ut.ag co-founder revealed a number of Tweets using the account: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ut.ag. Users will ultimately decide if this service is worth its salt. I would personally improve ad-serving, determine how to support all sites (frames may not be a good approach) and make sure that the approach itself is legally permissible. At least in their own jurisdiction:-)
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Hey Jonathon
Thanks for the review on uTag
You’re right in saying that we have a few things to sort out. Then again, we’re only 4 weeks old, so that’s kind of expected. That having been said, we’ve gradually been fixing things(changed the look of the ad pane, sorted out the contextualisation bug in the served ads etc.) so even today you’ll notice changes compared to last week.
At a higher level, I really want to impress upon people that we’re trying to be un-evil as possible with uTag. Our goal, since day 1, has been to reward the the real value of the social web, i.e. the filtering and recommending of relevant content by people, for and to their social networks.
We’re keen to get as much feedback as possible. To remove the stuff that annoys people and to improve the stuff that they like.
People can let us know what they think either through our Get Satisfaction page – http://getsatisfaction.com/utag – or directly (check the about section of our website)
Speaking of our website – we’e relasing a new version over the next couple of days, so check feel free to check it out and let us know what you think
K