Would you Sell Your Words to Make a Buck? There is an interesting trend emerging in the on-line world. According to an article in the most recent issue of Business Week, entitled "Pitching Between the Lines", advertisers are exploring a new goldmine of potential targets for their ads...Web surfers and blog readers!
The focus of the article was largely about competing for a powerful new entity known as "mind share." According to Vibrant Media, a marketing company that provides a product it describes as "contextual video advertising," every word across the Internet is an opportunity to engage your customers."
Vibrant Media business is to build branding for its customers through utilizing a specialized technology which underlines relevant text twice. When the cursor clicks over the selected word (which has been chosen by the client as being relevant to their brand), the advertisement appears in a small window and can contain a link which produces a bubble, a written pitch, a voice-over or video.
According to Business Week, 3-10% of web users actually click on in-text ads. The web media advertising revenue has increased 27% to 19.6 billion over the past year while newspaper advertising has decreased 1.7% to 46.6. billion. With this kind of money in the pot, it is understandable that the players are influential and the stakes are high.
This does raise some interesting issues however regarding the implications of words and how they are used or misused. It was pointed out in the Business Week article that some journalist think that "selling words" in a story may further blur the line between editorial and ad content. Apparently, in 2004 Forbes magazine on-line had a lot of negative backlash from the practise. But today many other companies are utilizing this technology. In fact the number of newspapers using the format offered through Vibrant Media has doubled this past year and now includes over 3,000 sites.
As Activerain network pursues syndication for blogging content, and the impact of blogging continues to grow, this will eventually impact the real estate industry. Real estate is the portal which opens up the door to an exponential amount of business. Think about the things that transpire when people move. Banks open new accounts, grocery stores and retail outlets get new customers, schools enroll new pupils...etc, etc. Billions of dollars move around each year because of the movement fostered by the efforts of the real estate community.
So, with that in mind...Would you Sell Your Words as Advertizing Bait for a Profit? Would it change What & How You Wrote? Just curious...
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