Would you Sell Your Words to Make a Buck? There is an interesting trend emerging in the on-line world. According to an article in the most recent issue of Business Week, entitled "Pitching Between the Lines", advertisers are exploring a new goldmine of potential targets for their ads...Web surfers and blog readers!
The focus of the article was largely about competing for a powerful new entity known as "mind share." According to Vibrant Media, a marketing company that provides a product it describes as "contextual video advertising," every word across the Internet is an opportunity to engage your customers."
Vibrant Media business is to build branding for its customers through utilizing a specialized technology which underlines relevant text twice. When the cursor clicks over the selected word (which has been chosen by the client as being relevant to their brand), the advertisement appears in a small window and can contain a link which produces a bubble, a written pitch, a voice-over or video.
According to Business Week, 3-10% of web users actually click on in-text ads. The web media advertising revenue has increased 27% to 19.6 billion over the past year while newspaper advertising has decreased 1.7% to 46.6. billion. With this kind of money in the pot, it is understandable that the players are influential and the stakes are high.
This does raise some interesting issues however regarding the implications of words and how they are used or misused. It was pointed out in the Business Week article that some journalist think that "selling words" in a story may further blur the line between editorial and ad content. Apparently, in 2004 Forbes magazine on-line had a lot of negative backlash from the practise. But today many other companies are utilizing this technology. In fact the number of newspapers using the format offered through Vibrant Media has doubled this past year and now includes over 3,000 sites.
As Activerain network pursues syndication for blogging content, and the impact of blogging continues to grow, this will eventually impact the real estate industry. Real estate is the portal which opens up the door to an exponential amount of business. Think about the things that transpire when people move. Banks open new accounts, grocery stores and retail outlets get new customers, schools enroll new pupils...etc, etc. Billions of dollars move around each year because of the movement fostered by the efforts of the real estate community.
So, with that in mind...Would you Sell Your Words as Advertizing Bait for a Profit? Would it change What & How You Wrote? Just curious...
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Lola Audu, is the Designated Broker & Owner of Audu Real Estate. Our company specializes in helping people buy and sell homes in the greater Grand Rapids, West Michigan area. We've had the privilege of helping hundreds of clients succeed in their goals of purchasing and selling property including demonstrated success in the negotiation of Short Sale Transactions. You can contact us via e-mail @ info@auduhomes.com or by phone at 616-791-0511.

I've seen this. However, it requires a pop-up and if there is one thing more annoying than a pop-up on a web page, it hasn't yet been invented.
I believe that the consumer is as disgusted by the constant marketing of everything all the time as am I.
It may also require a java app. That could make it difficult for Google to handle.
We'll see.
Lola,
Interesting and thought provoking topic. Will everything I read now be one giant advertisement? I hope not. When I write my blog posts, I want to get higher search engine rankings but not at the expense of my reading audience. I don't want every other sentence of my posts to be a keyword search term. The world of information keeps changing.
That was indeed an interesting article. Lola, there is so much that is changing and being added to the marketing of real estate and websites & blogs that I am interested as heck to see what the next year is going to bring.
Would I do it? Right now, no. Somehow it would feel depersonalized.
Hi Lola, I for one am already overwhelmed by the amount of advertising I am hit with on a daily basis. I have seen the little pop ups Lenn talks about, and they don't seem affected by a pop up blocker either.
Interesting Danny. It sounds like they were trying to get you to purchase a Search Engine Optimization Package. Now, here's the question. If you were being Paid to use the same keywords so they could be linked to a product commercial...would you? :)
Lola,
Sounds like the bubbles they had on MTV videos years ago that gave you facts about the bands while the video was playing. Now, it's coming to our blogs. Personally, I don't care for all the advertising these days and I'm sure it'd require some sort of pop-up. I'll have to be sure I have a really good filter in place.
As usual, a great thought provoking post, Lola. Thanks
Very intersting post Lola and a great read for sure. Makes you think about the things you write and post everywhere. Enjoyed reading it and thanks for sharing.
Holy yellow shirt Lola! Your new photo looks great.
I think that there is line of spam and not spam. If this trend is to increase, I think consumers will look for other websites and blogs with better content and less commercials. In my opinion, this is really building off of marketing such as Google Adsense. Incorporating advertising into the text is taking it up a notch.
This is an interesting post Lola. I flagged it. (apparently that is a good thing on ActiveRain.)
Lola,
We really should draw a line somewhere between content and advertising. If ads will appear from article words, it just blurs the article's message and confuses the reader. If this trend continues, soon we won't know fact from fiction. Good concept to bring up for discussion.