If you want to follow how Ormigo develops check out the Ormigo blog which is now online. Please, note that we keep the Ormigo blog in German at the moment.
For further questions, please, feel free to contact Oliver or me.
Seth Godin, author of six bestsellers as "All Markters are Liars", talks about flipping the funnel and turning your customers into a megaphone/salespeople instead of spending millions of ad dollars to convince them every time you launch a new product.
He talks about the Fashion/Permisson Complex meaning that you need a
product which gives you users permission to tell them about your next fashion/product. Once you have their permission you have potential customers and fans talking about your new product. To get their permisson you need the right story at the right time and the right place.
In his speech at Google he mentions that Google still misses permisson assets while Amazon has 16 Million permissons of users reading their mails.
In his point of view Web 2.0 is not about AJAX or better technology but about solutions
which works better the more people use it. In this case users have a selfish motivation to tell their friends
about it allowing for faster growth (e.g. e-bay, myspace).
For more information check his speech live at Google or his ebook "Flipping the funnel".
Technorati Tags: Flipping the funnel, Seth Godin, Web 2.0, Google
As Michael Arrington from Techcrunch puts it "Newsvine is perfect". Yes, it’s an awesome web 2.0 application allowing it’s members to read, chat, discuss and comment any news as well as to easily write news, publish an own column or just seed links to interesting articles.
The best: Each author gets 90% of his column’s revenue as well as 10% of the revenue of his referred friends. Brainstorming serveral business ideas within the last two years I asked myself how to track revenues, especially Google AdSense, within such a system. Has anyone an idea?
Maybe Aquantive founder Nick Hanauer who funded newsvine.com with ESPN.com CEO Mike Slade has found a solution to track and pay out any ad revenues efficiently, or do they just include Aquantive ads?
Newsvine has a very good regional function allowing for fast and worldwide growth. Congrats!
Wow, what a headline on ARD, one of the largest tv-channels in Germany, regarding to my previous work. Is OnVista smarter than Google?
Hard to believe that OnVista could be smarter than Google with it’s hundreds of PhD’s. But still, Ligatus is a good niche approach connecting large marketers who are willing to pay a premium price to get high quantity of qualified traffic with leading publishers taking at least for the moment some butter of Google’s bread. It will be interesting to see how this story is continuing…
Do you know any other performance marketing approach outperforming AdSense?
Two months ago I left Ligatus. It wasn’t such an easy decision to leave our baby, especially when you have such a great team at your side. But it was time to move on.
The best thing is that friendships always last. Yesterday we met to celebrate our own X-Mas party visiting the Kölner Weihnachtsmarkt with lot’s of Glühwein, Kölsch and of course lot’s of fun.
And suddenly I got an awesome present - my own tipp-kick player 
Thanks so much, and bet I’ll train for our next match up 
This summer I had the pleasure to meet Seth Goldstein discussing the future of lead based advertising and his ideas about Root Markets. I pretty much liked his mind shifting ideas although his concept behind was hard to understand.
As Pamela Parker of ClickZ puts it in her article following the lead to a more transparent future "Root Markets wants to do nothing less than marry the financial market with the Internet advertising market."
As the lead market is a high arbitrage business where publishers don’t know what their leads are worth, and consumers have little idea of what their data is worth to advertisers which face the problem to decide how much to pay for which lead, a transparent and liquid market is missing. That’s what Seth is up to:
"Our goal is to be a neutral, independent exchange where we try to get out of the way of the market participants. We want to provide some open market data and an environment in which people can compete and trade and do business under a level playing field. There’s no black box where we’re hiding performance data."
Another big thing about Root Markets is to empower users to control and handel their data via it’s non-profit AttentionTrust. Therefore, users can install a recorder which tracks everything they do with their browser. It both allows to turn of and deletion of data. As TechCrunch put’s it "you get two primary benefits - the ability to see your own data (see screen shot), and the ability to trade your data to other parties for some benefit - like more targeted advertising that you will actually find useful."
I like both ideas to create transparent markets and empowering consumers, but still believe it’s hard to revolutionize such a fragmented market with as many players as consumers, publishers, intermediaries, advertisers as well as investors.
All the best for you and your great team, Seth. I will stay watching
TDavid has a very intersting post about "accidense" meaning what happens when people accidentally click on Google Adsense ads due to white space arround the ad. He noticed that some AdSense ads have more white space than others fostering more non-intentional clicks. I noticed that accidense happens pretty often to me on skyscrapers and wallpapers when I try to scroll down on my notebook.
So, why the hell are accidense possible? Maybe, because it’s just to hard to make the white color space arround ads and links unclickable
I believe accidense happens becaue there are losers and winners like in real life: users lose time and focus, while advertisers lose money to publishers and/or syndicators as Google which are the real winners like insureances.
So, why don’t advertisers do anything against accidense? Hmm, maybe first of all they don’t know about. Second, they lose control about ad delivery when they once set their clickprice in AdWords. Third, they need to control their performance from ad delivery to user’s last action which is still a very challenging task for even large marketers.
Due to market pressure Google might give advertisers back more control as they just have started to do with the possibility to bid different prices on search and contextual placements as well as choosing certain pages. But still, accidense next to click-fraude will cause more non-intentional traffic and additional expenses on advertiser’s side.
Last Friday I got a call regarding to my post about pay-per-call from an entrepreneur setting up a new business. His question in mind was, if I’m setting up a similar business. As we don’t, we had a nice talk about lot’s of stuff like raising money for our new businesses.
On the one hand it shows that we have to communicate what Ormigo is about (so, we will after closing our first round of financing), and on the other hand it shows the true power of sharing your thoughts. After having setup my blog just two weeks ago I was really surprised to get instant feedback. Very cool. So, let’s keep on talking.
Thomas Hawk has a very interesting case study whichs shows why Flickr wins over WebShots. Alexa shows that Fickr for the first time has overtaken Webshots in traffic, although the former market leader Webshots started in 1995 while Flickr showed up for the first time in Q1/2004. So, why the hell it took Flickr less then 1 1/2 year to become the market leader?
As Eirik Solheim put’s it on his blog Fickr is a great example of a successful web 2.0 service with the following properties:
It’s very inspiring to see how fast Flickr has grown through it’s open approach for sharing photos.