Startup Idea #90: Feeds based advertising

Fred Wilson had a great post last week on opening up our feeds to advertisements. This post follows up on what he was saying earlier about the importance of feeds, of which I had posted

My personal view is that the advertising model for feeds will not be in the form of what we are used to in Google Adsense. Your feeds are too personal for advertisers to insert anything and not pissed you off. I think the advertising model should be the other way around. Rather than advertisements, it should be recommendations. There are important but subtle differences between the two.

I think the recommendation model can work in either or a combination of the two models highlighted below.

In the first model, the service detects your consumption of a product/service through your feeds and offers to you, the option to recommend this product/service to your social network. If this service can detect your sentiment about this product/service and only pops up when the quality is good, then its usefulness immediately shoots up. If it can know the interests of your social networks and recommends only to those who might be interested in the product/service you just consumed, then it is a home run.

The second possible model starts off when one of your friends in your social network asks, via feeds, for recommendations. The service detects what relevant products/services you have consumed and asked if you want to recommend them to this friend. If so, the recommendation appears in your friends' feeds.

Both models work on the principle of recommendations, rather than advertisements. As I said, there are important differences as the former rewards your attention while the latter simply robs you of it.

If you know of other advertisement models, do share them in the comments section. my thoughts on.

Posted in: advertising,network,startup business ideas