http://www.jagular.com/netads.shtml
| Spam email and banner ads are a poor method for advertising because they annoy people. The Internet is full of poorly designed web pages and the pages which are useful can be difficult to find. This page outlines my idea for sponsoring a series of high-quality web pages as a method of advertising. The ideas is presented as something which I would do if I were CEO of a computer programmer recruitment agency. |
If I ran a computer programmer recruitment agency I would want to promote the services and people available from my company and I would want to do so keeping the following two things in mind:
Most web pages are poorly designed. Even many websites developed by major corporations leave a lot to be desired. Many of the websites which do offer useful information make the user pay for the information, either by charging them directly or by subjecting them to banner ads, pop-up windows or auto-spawned pages. It is surprisingly difficult to find a website which contains useful information which is properly organized and which is not filled with garish advertisements.
Many of the websites which were once useful and popular have been bought by people who only want to sell ads. A good example of this is www.MapQuest.com, a site which used to be a good place to get electronic maps but which has now been ruined by being filled with ads for credit cards and other things with no relationship to maps -- I can't even figure out anymore how to see a map of my own neighborhood. I suppose that the people who started MapQuest probably made a lot of money but it makes me wonder whether there is anyone left at MapQuest who has any sense of aesthetics.
The way I would promote my recruitment agency would be to sponsor a series of high-quality websites which would be designed and maintained by the programmers available through my company. I would also pay those programmers (in addition to paying them for their regular work for clients) according to the popularity of the pages they develop. I would arrange to develop the websites and pay everyone under the following scheme.
I would form a group within my company which I will call the "website development group." This group (it could be a single individual) would be responsible for authorizing websites to be developed. A new website would be proposed and developed by programmers who work through my agency. Each website would have its own domain name rather than using a sub-domain of my corporate site so that the website could be sold later if it becomes popular. Each website would have an identified webmaster and each page on the site would have an identified author. A website would then be developed under the direction of my website development group, it would be managed by a webmaster who is a programmer working with my agency and the pages on the site would be authored by either the webmaster for the site and/or other programmers working through my agency. All of the pages on all of the sites would identify my company, my website development group, the site webmaster and the page author in a clear but unobtrusive way (perhaps with a footer in small text at the bottom of every page and perhaps with my company logo in the corner of every page as well).
The hits on the various pages of the site would be counted on a page-by-page basis and money would be paid under a scheme which could be adjusted for each site if that seemed appropriate. Money would be paid by my company (which would be, at least in the beginning, the sole sponsor for these sites) to members of each of four groups:
I would "pay" my own company because this retains the flexibility of attracting other sponsors or having one division of my company pay another division. The amount of money paid to these four groups could be the same for all four or it could be different for each group. On some sites I might pay more to, say, the author of the page than I would to the website manager or the website development group while on some other site the relative payouts might be different. A "hit" would have to be precisely defined - it could perhaps be defined as a viewing of the page by a unique I.P. address during a specific period of time such as 4 hours (it is possible to know the I.P. address from which the user is coming - see my page at http://www.jagular.com/environment.shtml). If the same I.P. address accessed the page multiple times within that period (or some other defined period) it might be counted as just one hit. If members of all four groups each received $0.01 per hit and a particular page had 5,000 hits in one month then my company would pay $50.00 to each of the four groups for a total of $200.00 for that page for that month.
The hit logs would be available to everyone involved in the payments for a particular page so that each person could verify the accuracy of the payment calculations for themselves but the website development group would actually be responsible for keeping the logs and calculating the payments.
The purpose of developing the websites would be to demonstrate the ability of the website developers and page authors in my company as well as to show that my company is making a useful contribution to the Internet and that we understand what good workmanship and good information presentation looks like. For these reasons we would want to choose the website topics carefully and we probably would not want the various sites we develop to overlap very much in their content. There are many hundreds of possible topics to cover however and so we could develop many sites before we ran out of ideas. Good topics for new websites might include:
The topics covered would not have to be directly or even indirectly related to computers or the Internet or the services offered by my agency. Many of the topics would already be covered by other websites developed and sponsored by other companies but we would set up our sites to be superior to theirs in the following ways:
One of the great underutilized potential businesses on the Internet is to develop a website, build up a readership and then sell the site. In fact, I am beginning to take advantage of this potential with my development of www.LiveTheatreInfo.com, a site which will feature information about the live theatre scene in various cities (including, eventually, New York City) and which I might try to sell after I have received a few hundred thousand hits and a few recommendations in the theatre press. We sometimes hear of cases such as www.MyDesktop.com which was apparently developed by some kids and sold for $1,000,000 but there are many other sites which could be developed and then sold once they have proven themselves. (Unfortunately MyDesktop.com is another example of a good site which has been ruined by ads: I guess if I ever sell LiveTheatreInfo.com I will have to decide whether I am willing to make a pile of money in return for allowing that site to be ruined by ads for credit cards).
Sometimes we would develop a site which could be sold to someone else. We would of course have to agree between my company and the website developers what would happen in this case but I suspect that we could agree to a scheme in which the proceeds from the sale of the site would be distributed to the four groups in the same proportion as the hit payments had been made up to the moment of the sale.
Sometimes another company would want to contribute sponsorship to one of our sites (perhaps they would rather sponsor some pages than buy the site outright). My view is that this would not be done with banner ads but rather with clear but unobtrusive indications of their sponsorship. Perhaps some pages could end up with as many as four or five company logos, around the size of two regular icons side-by-side each, along the bottom of the pages. I would be strict about not letting the sponsorship logos interfere with the look and utility of the pages themselves and I would not want pages in which no information appeared while the page was loading into the user's browser because large advertising graphics were loading into the window before the actual page information. If a page is well-designed and useful then it will be good enough that the sponsors' logos eventually appear at the bottom of the page after all of the information has loaded.
In developing these sites and paying the developers and page authors we would have to make allowances for people entering and leaving a project and people authoring the initial version of a page and then allowing someone else to take over as the page author. My proposal would be for the scheme to allow for an identified "website development group manager" as well as a "previous website development group manager", a "site webmaster" as well as a "previous site webmaster" and a "page author" as well as a "previous page author". The payments to a group would then be divided for a pre-specified time between the person in a group and the person who was previously in that group. If we were paying $0.01 per hit to the page author for instance then we could pay, say, $0.005 per hit to the previous page author and $0.005 per hit to the current author (the person who is maintaining and perhaps expanding the page) for a few months, after which time the current author would start getting the full $0.01 per hit. The ratio between the two individuals and the period during which both are paid could of course be adjusted.
It would be important to pay both the current page author or site webmaster as well as the previous person because when a new person first takes over a site or a page most of the hits they get would be due to work done by the previous person and gradually their maintenance and upgrading of the content would mean that more and more of the hits are due to their own work. I think that if a site were sold we could still allocate the proceeds of the sale based on the hit payments made to everyone over the entire life of the site, even if some particular person had not worked on the site for several years.
Although there are millions of pages on the Internet it can still be difficult to find clear, well-organized pages on the topic of one's choosing. The experience of surfing the Internet can be very frustrating as a result of this and the frustration can be greatly increased if one is constantly confronted with garish advertising to the point that it is not clear which parts of a page are the contents of the page itself and which parts are the ads. If I were running a computer programmer recruitment agency I would use these facts as an opportunity to promote my company and my programmers as a group of people who are willing and able to provide relief from these frustrations.