Startup Idea #92: Ad insertion for self publishing

Ever since I learn about Topspinmedia, I have been researching for such equivalent in other media sectors such as games, video and books. One company that caught my eye is Lulu, the platform for self publishers. Beyond providing a publishing tool, Lulu understands that getting attention, not distribution, is what self publishers need to monetise their work in this age of abundance. Let's look at some of the tools they have put in place.

First of all, they understand the importance of search. Tools like online marketing and Google book search enables authors to easily leverage search to gather more attention for their work.

Lulu also enables viral distribution via a comprehensive set of tools such as widgets, banners and linking to social networks and social news sites. Again, these help the authors to easily spread their work across the web and increases the probability of their work becoming a snowball.

Finally, they also provide tools for authors to create press releases, websites et al that assists in the traditional marketing side of the equation.

Overall, if I am an author, all these tools provide a real service to help me gather attention to my work. However, in this age of abundance, the most effective way to gather attention might be giving something away for free is a an effective way to gather attention first. To do this however, you need an easy way to get advertisement. This is where advertisement insertion technologies are needed.

The difficult thing in this business is to gather the statistics and aggregate them in a way that is meaning to advertisers. For the near term, I see a federated media approach might work best, where a startup can gather the best independent authors to create high quality inventory for advertisements. In the middle term, an auction system akin to Adsense might evolved.

Whatever the model, I think advertisments are necessary to provide an alternate way to help self publishers monetise their work. While Lulu is great as it is, I think ads are needed to make this an evenmore healthy ecosystem.

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