monetising - TheWayoftheWeb

Watch Chatroulette jump the shark….

July 26, 2010 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

I’m watching the usage of Chatroulette carefully at the moment as it could be about to prove a theory I’ve had for a while…

When I’ve researched streaming video/webcam sites in the past, I’ve seen that besides some notable brand channels, the majority of broadcasters seem to be under 20, and the most popular ones then to be female. And due to the often disturbing nature of the conversations and videochats that arise, the likes of Justin.tv, Stickam etc have all tried to clamp down on this behaviour with automated and human filtering and moderation. They’ve tended to focus their efforts on encouraging brand content and integrating with platforms such as Facebook, whilst suffering the occasional challenge from their use for the illegal rebroadcasting of PayPerView sporting events etc.

Yesterday Chatroulette founder and CEO Andrey Ternovskiy posted a lengthy and thoughtful post regarding the service famed for the frequency of naked males appearing on webcam – the speed with which you cycle through prospective chat partners highlighted how many guys looking for an audience.

‘ Recently I decided to seriously look into issue again, and I’ve had a breakthrough.
Luckily we all live in a real world, and we can easily apply the laws of a real world even on an internet application. With the help of a few good developers we’ve started collecting information, such as IP addresses, logs and screen captures of offenders who actually break US/UN laws by broadcasting inappropriate content in a specific situations. We’ve captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behavior. We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have. I hope that with help of a Criminal law we can finally get the problem out of our shoulders and get existing organizations which usually solve these kind of problems to help us.’

I definitely agree with measures to prevent images being received by anyone who hasn’t chosen to see them, or those who are below the age at which they can choose for themselves.

But I’m struggling to see exactly how Chatroulette will continue to function without the reason it came to fame in the first place – the notoriety for nudity. The launch of Channelroulette means that there’s a specific part of the site for those wishing for more adult content, but there’s still no age restriction or barrier to anyone entering, and as the audience is split into groups, the serendipity of a large, random pool of potential connections is going to be minimised.

So I’m going with two hunches – the decision to crack down on offensive/illegal activities was prompted by the investors in the service (The ability to capture IP addresses and screen captures doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary), and traffic to the site is about to take a big dive.

Possibly there’s a revolutionary new video service about to spring out of Chatroulette which might leapfrog Justin, Stickam et al in their efforts to increase the revenue from broadcasting webcam streams. But there doesn’t seem to be a clear path at the moment, considering Ternovskiy ends with the hope ‘someday our service will become a beautiful video world, an internet country with no borders and locations’. Just after mentioning their new location-matching algorithm).

Video is definitely significant as broadband speeds increase (and sadly data caps often decrease), but it still tends to be primarily a consumption medium with significant streaming and distribution costs. And I’m not sure Chatroulette is going to move any further than the existing services in creating successful video-based businesses.

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Filed Under: social networks, video Tagged With: andrey ternovskiy, business strategy, chatroulette, ip blocking, ip tracking, monetising, screen caps, streaming video, streaming webcams

Do UK businesses really value Twitter?

December 11, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Techcrunch recently picked up on a poll by Accredited Supplier of 1200 UK businesses who are currently using Twitter, and echoed the findings that ‘UK Business bullish in Twitter’.

Besides the caveat that the UK businesses that are so bullish are the ones that are actually already using it, there’s a little bit of interesting info in it.

Apparently 62% of UK businesses are using Twitter purely as a branding exercise, with 33% combining branding and sales, and 15% using it purely for sales (They might want to take a look at Dell making millions on Twitter for starters).

But then it goes on to reveal that just 14% of the businesses are tweeting daily, and 21% weekly. Which leaves 65% posting a monthly message or less – should that even count as a business using Twitter?

So there’s no surprise that 84% don’t think they’ve achieved a return on investment so far – but strangely more businesses would be willing to pay for ‘additional business functionality’ at 22%, than have actually claimed a return on investment (16%).

So maybe a better headline and summary would be that UK businesses are still mightily confused when it comes to Twitter. Some of them want more functionality despite not seeing any returns, and many of them claim they’re using it when they might log in less than 12 times a year.

They haven’t so much missed the point as built a dual carriageway bypass around it.

If you’re starting to use Twitter on behalf of your business, you need to have a quick think about what it is you’re looking to achieve and how it benefits your business – getting messages out there is somewhat useful in itself, but generally it’s expected that you might look at the rate of acquisition from a source, and the investment of resource it’s taken, and then weigh that against other sources of visitors/buyers/purchases.

Then you can not only determine the true level of ROI, but also potentially justify actually engaging on a regular basis and utilising Twitter as both a customer acquisition channel – but also as a customer retention channel. While new customers are great, it’s more cost effective to retain a current customer by increasing loyalty – and although you might need to interact and ask questions on at least a weekly basis, the amount of loyalty and customer service you can action can be measured as a definite return.

I suspect you could perform the same poll with most of the common tools – email, Facebook, Myspace etc, and you’d probably get similar results, because the same people have signed up without a plan after seeing the buzz, dabbled a little, and have no idea what they’re doing next.

Which means that there are big opportunities if you’re reading blogs like this, using Twitter on a regular basis and developing or following a clear plan with a decent amount of ROI.

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Filed Under: Monetising, twitter Tagged With: branding, Business, monetising, revenue, twitter

Ad.ly targets celebs with the same old sponsored Tweet model

September 22, 2009 By Dan Thornton 3 Comments

Ad.ly is a self-serve Twitter advertising network matching advertisers and celebrities to tweet about products. The celeb gets to approve or decline messages, and advertisers get tracking for click-through rates, retweets and geographic locations for Retweeters. The celebs set their own price, but Ad.ly gives suggestions, and the celebrity has to tweet four times in the course of a week, netting them five figure sums for each message if they have more than a millions followers.

So that’s Magpie or Izea Sponsored Tweets system just with only celebrities. And apparently that’s enough to have attracted Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson for the launch.

It’s potentially a good move to only have celebrities involved – that way you only go for the big ticket advertising to generate the share for Ad.ly. But it’s not exactly an evolution of monetising Twitter for individuals.

I’m not going to rant about sponsored tweets as having tested them, I’ve continued to use Magpie on the odd occasion – within a few days each year it effectively pays for my hosting costs, and with a young family and little time to monetise Twitter in other ways, I can just about justify it to myself.

But surely celebrities actually have far more to lose? And less to gain considering the myriad ways which they can effectively monetise their followers and fans through their products? Particularly the hypothetical example Ad.ly is using

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Filed Under: Advertising, twitter Tagged With: ad.ly, Advertising, cash, celebrity, monetising, money, sponsored, twitter

Monetising Twitter with Magpie Ads – Week 2 round-up

December 12, 2008 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

When I wrote about my first week of using Magpie to monetise my Twitter account, I wondered if there was the inventory to even get close to the ratios of 5 posts to one advert.

The second week appears to be backing up this theory – since then I’ve had just a couple of advertising messages, raising my earnings up to the 17 Euro mark, despite leaving the ratio at 5:1. At this rate it will be quite a while before I reach the minimum payout of 50 Euros.

But as I said before, this is a good thing in some ways, as one or two adverts a day seems to be an amount that doesn’t offend – and perhaps the number of advertisers will increase after Twitter co-founder Biz Stone picked the service over monetisation alternative Twittad in an LA Times article.

“I think any kinds of projects that focus more on the Twitter updates are more compelling,” Stone said.

For the record, Twittad is claiming 1600 sign-ups, 170 advertisers, and I’ve just finished my first month of allowing them to serve adverts on my profile page. (Feel free to book me for another month right now!)

Interestingly Ev Williams has recently said the economic climate means Twitter will seek to monetise in Quarter 1 2009.

From Cnet: “The revenue plans aren’t just ads or sponsorships. “We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”

Still, in the meantime if you want to try Magpie, why not use a link that also helps to fund 140char? Strangely the Twittad affiliate scheme seems to have a form error at the moment.

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