You’ve likely heard the term before. Essentially, viral marketing means getting consumers to spread the word. As you can imagine, this is highly desirable to brands and products….free marketing. And not just any marketing…recommendations and suggestions from friends are extremely valuable…arguably the most valuable part of the marketing mix.
But as we all know…nothing is free. The cost of this “free” marketing includes the value of your time, the value of your network of friends, and the value of your influence. All very powerful and important things that are being deployed daily to create revenue for various companies and products. Web sites like Facebook and Twitter are worth billions of dollars thanks to viral marketing.
Here at Gomper, we wonder….if consumers are doing all the marketing work, why aren’t they getting paid for the value they are creating? Why is someone else reaping the reward for your work?
We’re going to do it a little differently here….we want you to tell your friends about what we are doing here. Mention Gomper to friends. Blog about it. Share it with your social network. As your friend list on Gomper grows, so will your earning. It’s very simple…you don’t need to buy anything or sell anything….just help to spread the word on a really cool and unique idea and watch the money add up.
We’ve been trying to get this project off the ground for a little while now and we are finally ready to launch our Beta. Still a ton of work to do, but we’re ready to get this out there.
With a lot of new people coming to check us out, it makes sense to take a step back and explain what Gomper is trying to accomplish.
The concept of Gomper is fairly simple. Advertisers spend billions every year buying consumer time and attention….your time and attention. We here at Gomper think that money belongs to you.
We’ve built a simple app that you can download to your PC. When you have it open, it docks to any of the 4 sides of your screen and all your other windows resize around it. When it’s open, you get paid. It’s really that simple. You don’t have to visit new sites or spend your time any differently than you do now.
Your attention is being bought and sold every day. With Gomper, you finally get a seat at the table. We hope you’ll check it out and spread the words.
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This is pretty interesting. I don’t really have a take on it, but it’s worth sharing.
The Federal Trade Commission has launched www.admongo.com. Admongo is an adventure game, where kids have to travel around identifying advertisements, answering questions, collecting points, etc. The purpose is to make kids more aware of marketers and their intentions. Or as the site puts it…
Welcome to Admongo where advertising is all around you.
Online. Outside. On television. Who makes ads?
How do they work? What do they want you to do?
Here, you will explore, discover, and learn.
Can you make it to the top?
It’s an odd use of our tax dollars, but hard to argue with anything that protects children. However it does raise the question…what are we protecting kids from? From being too valuable too marketers? Marketers are spending billions on this incredibly valuable audience. If that money went into college funds, wouldn’t the game be different?
How about a game where you increase your consumer value and rack up the money as you see ads, share buying preferences, provide personal info, invite friends, write blogs, build social networking profiles, and provide product feedback? Let kids (and adults too) see what makes them valuable as consumers so that they can maximize the value as they choose. Sounds more fun. Of course it only works if the money flows to the consumers. But think about it…maybe kids’ll think twice before spending $50 to wear and Abercrombie & Fitch logo on their chest. They’ll still wear the shirt….if A&F pays them $5 to do so. What parent can’t see the logic in that?
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I’m not the only one noticing how much value we are all generating for the companies that sell out time, attention and personal information.
Vitrue has built a “Social Page Evaluator” to measure how much money your Facebook page is worth. How much your “brand” is worth on Facebook. The tool looks at page traffic, the effectiveness of your social media efforts, and a few other points. Certainly not hard science, but it’s another step in understanding just how valuable we are. And understanding how much money is being exchanged buying and selling us.
This tool only looks at Facebook. Imagine now adding in the money spent on all the ads you see on the web, TV, radios, magazines, billboards….now add in all your personal information that had been collected, bought and sold. Plug all of that into a calculator and you’ll see that you have a massively valuable asset that you are letting others monetize.
Your value belongs to you.
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The Interactive Advertising Bureau just released industry data for the first quarter of 2010.
Advertisers spent $5.9 billion buying online “media”. We know of course they were not buying media…they were buying access to consumer time and attention.
Meanwhile, ComScore reported that advertisers bought a record 1.1 TRILLION ”display advertising” impressions in Q1…the graphical ads you see around the web. I love the way ComScore refers to this…”US Internet Users received a record 1.1 trillion display ads“….exactly. Why didn’t US Internet users receive the record money spent on those display ads?
1.1 trillion ads served up to consumers. $5.9 billion changing hands. And that’s just for 3 months.
The money goes to the companies who amass a large audience of consumers and have the real estate to present ads to those consumers. On Gomper, we enable consumers to join together into large audiences. We provide you with the real estate via the Gomper Companion, and we take care of the rest. How many more trillion ads do we need to see before we realize it’s us the advertisers are paying for? $5.9 billion…say it with me a few times….
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The outcry of concern over Facebook’s plans for your personal information is fast and furious. Every day there are more bloggers, more journalists, more consumer advocates, more politicians….all concerned. Some are scratching their heads over the usage and accessibility of personal information. Others, like me, are more concerned over the economics of who should receive the value generated by your personal information.
This very cool, and very scary graphic is something you gotta check out. http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ (It’s best viewed in Chrome or Firefox). It’s an interactive 5 year progression of the default privacy settings for your Facebook account. While checking this out, imagine the enormous amount of money that our information will be generating….for Facebook and their business partners.
It’s a personal information land grab. The gold rush of 2010. Facebook is planting flags in all of our backyards claiming this land in the name of the King. I say…power to the people!
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I’ve written about this before but it continues to amaze me so I’ll continue to write about it now and again. Last year, Yahoo! spent $100 million buying advertisements on competing media companies trying to grow their audience of consumers. It didn’t work. Home page and search traffic did not change.
So now they are at it again. Yahoo! just announced a $75+ million ad blitz on TV, the web, and outdoor billboards. So websites that you are loyal to will be suggesting that you leave them to develop loyalty for a competing web site. I still have trouble wrapping my brain around that. TV networks that are fighting desperately to keep you in front of the TV will be encouraging you to head to your computer to check out Yahoo!. “Your favite stuff all in one place”. Not here on our network or on our network’s website….no, it’s over at Yahoo.
And here’s another thought. Yahoo has to spend $175 million in advertising to try to collect consumers into big enough audiences to attract hopefully more than $175 million in advertising revenue for Yahoo. And they spend it with companies who spend similarly trying to grow their own audience of consumers. Advertising dollars flowing every which way to try to temporarily gain access to you so that more ad dollars can flow. Everyone’s getting paid except for consumers…the folks who actually control the supply of time and attention. Should we be surprised when it doesn’t work?
Gomper thinks advertisers who want your attention will have a better chance if the money flows directly to you.
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I still remember the Apple ad campaign with the intentionally poor grammar. “Think Different” we were asked to do…and man, did we listen.
Now I wonder if Steve Jobs has changes his philosophy to “Think Status Quo”. Here’s what I mean.
We all look at our new smart phones and mobile devices as communication tools. As…well, as phones and access points. But in the advertising community, it’s looked at as the “Third Screen”….maybe more powerful and valuable than any ‘screen” than has existed to date. The value of reaching you and me wherever we are…with knowledge of where we are. It’s arguably scary and undeniably valuable. But who owns your mobile attention?
Steve Jobs recently pulled the curtain off their plans for the screens in your pocket, purse, or satchel. He calls it iAds, and it is an Apple owned ad sales team that sells all of your mobile time and attention when you are using apps and other mobile utilities. Here’s a good article on concerns amongst Apple’s audience.
I am a realist and I fully expect more and more ads to start popping up on my mobile web browser or within the mobile applications I use. But I don’t want to repeat the model of the 1950s, where consumers let others profit from our time, consideration, and information. If I pay for my phone, pay for my service, then the value of my time and attention on that phone using that service belongs to me, not Apple. If Apple wants it, they can give me a free phone and subsidized phone service. Instead, Apple will apply the typical media model, with dollars spent buying access to us going to Apple and its content creators, not us.
How about cutting me in on how much I am worth? Think Different, Steve.
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I wasn’t the only person to raise an eyebrow over the Facebook announcement I blogged about earlier in the week. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and 3 of his peers are seriously concerned.
There’s plenty of strong ammo from the Distinguished Gentlemen and Facebook is going to head to Washington to address the questions. In case you don’t have a chance to click through to the article, my favorite quote actually isn’t from one of the elected officials….
“I can see how it would be advantageous to advertisers,” Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of Facebook’s “Open Graph” changes. “It’s just unclear how making this information public is advantageous to users.”
…and that’s just it. Media companies like Facebook want to make their user base (you and me) as valuable as possible to advertisers. But instead of sharing the value with you and me, typically, it’s at our expense. Facebook wins. Advertisers win. And guess who loses?
Our personal information is incredibly valuable and sought after. I don’t want to fight that it has value, in fact, ideally I’d like to maximize how valuable it is. If someone wants to pay money to find out what movies I watch, bring it on! But I’ll put up a fight that my personal information belongs to me and not to Facebook. Whatever my info is worth also belongs to me, not to Facebook.
Gomper ’s purpose is to unlock your value as a consumer for yourgain. If Gomper members want to share info, Gomper members make more money. It’s an idea even congress can get behind.
I spent the better part of last week at the AdTech conference here in SF wearing a Gomper T Shirt and starting to publicly talk about what we are trying to accomplish here. The show was well attended and a good indication of how much money is being spent in the advertising economy regardless of global economic conditions.
Typically, themes emerge at conferences such as this, and this week it seemed like everyone was talking about Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing has emerged as the walls have come down in advertising. It used to be that a company like NetFlix and University of Phoenix would hire an ad agency to buy all their media placements and generate their sales leads. But today other options exist. Independent web entrepreneurs can comb through thousands of offers on affiliate networks that pay anyone who can get them a lead or a sale. Affiliate Marketers bring leads and new customers to these marketers and get paid very handsomely for their hard work.
But it is hard work. You have to stay on top of the best offers and the best sources. It’s not realistic for a typical consumer to become an Affiliate Marketer. But Gomper has a simple way for you to make the money without all the effort. Build your friend list on Gomper and as more and more of your friends join the Gomper community, you’ll earn more and more for your time spent.
You spread the word on the Gomper Revolution. We’ll sell the ads. We’ll stay on top of the best offers. We’ll unlock the value of consumers and share it with consumers.
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