Monetizing Info via Creating Content Ads

October 6, 2009

I found “One Riot Aims to Make Money from Twitter Search” quite interesting. If you are looking for a new slant on monetizing content, Rafe Needleman’s write up is a good place to start. The real time search vendor One Riot has developed a method for placing content objects adjacent search results. Instead of a Google ad, One Riot uses a semi-Google style design to present related content. The new twist: content providers pay One Riot for placement. For me the most interesting comment in the article was:

It’s a unique plan to monetize Twitter, but it’s a delicate balance. Essentially it’s an arbitrage model: Musk is asking publishers, who are paid by advertisers, to themselves pay for advertising on One Riot to get more traffic, thus increasing their revenue yield per page. There’s nothing fundamentally new about the concept (TV shows are advertised on TV all the time), but it’s a bit of a tightrope. (Disclosure: I have heard that CBS is a partner of One Riot, but Musk would not confirm this with me. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS. ) RiotWise ads will run on the One Riot.com site, but the real potential for this plan, according to Musk, lies in the integration of RiotWise into Twitter apps. Potential customers are Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. In two weeks, a new application programming interface will let developers embed RiotWise suggestions into search results. One Riot will share revenues with app developers for these paid links.

The content objects are tweets, but I see applications for other sources going forward. The challenge will be to monetize content at a low cost. If One Riot cracks that nut, the company could be caught in a windstorm of cash.

Stephen Arnold, October 6, 2009, No dough

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