This post by venture capitalist Fred Wilson is pretty much a direct support and affirmation of the core of Qumana's business model. While the excerpt below doesn't contain the explicit confirmation, elsewhere in the post Fred gets into the effective increases in click-through rates due to placement of adverts, etc.
That is all that Word of Blog does rigt now.
I thought it was neat and during our meeting, I posted an ad for Grameen Foundation on this blog via Word of Blog. It's in the upper right side column.
Neither Matt nor I had planned it, but we launched World of Blog that morning because within days, the service was spreading virally.
I have had 499 click thrus on my Grameen ad since then which is 10.4 clicks per day.
For comparison, Adsense has only generated 399 clicks over the same time period.
And there is no fancy contextual targeting engine working at Word of Blog.
The reason this works is that I selected my ad because I believe in Grameen and I give it really good placement on my blog.
Anyone who wants me to promote their cause should post an ad at Word of Blog and I'll run it if I like the cause.
I was curious to see if this would work for commercial ads as well.
Here he gets more deeply into the mechanics.
Word of Blog works best for now in the non-profit world because their is no commerce mechanism to get paid for click thrus.
But I am certain that they will build that if the market demands it.
This is being built .. we are working hard on it. He seems very interested in all this, but wasn't so when we contacted him several months ago by email. Too small a deal and way up there in Canada (never mind that Vancouver has become a real blogging hotspot, with some interesting stuff coming out of here ... Flickr, Bryght, Qumana, mezzoblue, etc.)
And even more clearly ...
I wrote a piece several weeks ago called posting, subscribing, and tagging.
That's what I see Word of Blog doing over time.
Advertisers will post ads.
Bloggers and other publishers will subscribe to them by placing them on their sites.
And people will tag them to make them relevant.
What he said .. what we are working towards.
Technorati Tags : contextual+advertising, business+models
