Trackback from Notebooks24…

In Soviet Russia, the ads watch you!

Basically your system would commoditize splash pages and interstitial advertising and allow spammers to horn in on the current legitimate advertising market. “We’ve got this high quality stuff over here” … but to see it, you need to earn some iRubles …

Under this system, instead of hitting a full-screen ad after clicking the “next page” link on you would end up getting a “payment denied: insufficient funds to finish reading this article” message and be directed to http://www.allourads.net where you can earn more iRubles to pay for your reading privilege.

The reason this won’t fly isn’t because spammers won’t pay, it’s because:

A) No publisher in their right mind would take money from spammers to place ads for phony viagra on their site, and they won’t want anything to do with a system that allows those spammers to get involved in the money making process.

B) No legitimate advertiser will be willing to enter a market where they have to compete for eyeballs with any scammer that’s earned a few iRubles by fake-clicking on legitimate ads … and then spends them to pay for phony scam emails.

If you think there’s a central agency able to police the use of iRubles so that they can’t be abused to send scam email, please sic them on the domain parking establishment ;)

Spot on comment as always… I am totally aware that I am not the first with that kind of idea. The link section should make that more than clear. Yes, spam karma 2 works beautifully and the private mail servers should catch up soon.

The problem I address is more a push pull problem and my solution is more of a sketch than a real solution.

The thing I thought I came up with was to introduce a differenciation between push and pull coped with a remuneration system. Reward people for consuming pushed information and let them use that “money” to pull information.

I see no “silver bullet” solution to spam. The best we can probably hope for is more intelligent mass-analysis software such as gmail’s spam filter – it looks at everyone’s email and analyses which ones have thousands of identical copies, which ones were marked as spam by some users, the ones people deleted without opening. That kind of intelligent software is probably our only hope.

Email is popular because it’s a standard and it’s inherently free. That freedom leads to abuse, as it does in all other areas, and you can’t really solve it directly. What we will see isn’t reward systems or other technical solutions like you propose, but instead sorting systems, where junk goes to the bottom according to an extremely intelligent algorithm. There’s plenty of junk web sites as well, but you never see them, because you use Google, and it “just knows” what you want, right? I notice you have Spam Karma 2 installed on this blog, it works pretty well, right?

Email will go the same way. In fact – it already has. Junk email isn’t really a problem for me anymore, mostly thanks to google, but it won’t take too long for private mail servers (which I’m guessing you use ..) to catch up.

• Companies pay for attention
• Producers of high quality contents get paid through their advertisers
• Users earn virtual money that they can trade in for access to quality content, but not for money

It is key to find a way that only people who produce quality contents get paid. The money stream:

• Companies pay content producers
• Content producers give out tokens
• Readers trade in those tokens for access to quality content

There is a new “pay to receive” cellphone text advertising system in New Zealand: http://hoohaa.co.nz/ You receive 10c in cell phone credit for each message received. I’ve only received 2 messages since signing up about a month ago, and you have to have $2.50 credit before you receive the credit. It might be a while.

Not wanting to sound too negative, but here are some difficulties people might have setting up such systems.

The main potential problem is people may click or receive ads but there’s no guarantee they’ll read them. Also how would the advertiser confirm it’s a real person receiving the message, and not an automated system? (captcha’s perhaps?)

Also imagine the problems people would have with spam filters, filtering out the desired “junk emails”.

I’m trying a different approach with my own advertising system: http://bla.st/ (side note, I have made information architects a couple of free cards – Hope that’s OK!: http://bla.st/information-architects/ ) The idea of bla.st is to turn advertising into desirable content, by making it interesting, relevant, and easy to browse and search, like a directory.