Viral Advertising for Cash

try this at home…

Newspapers are going out of business because it turns out that anyone can write a blog and upload it to the web.

So the exclusivity of print journalism is a thing long gone. And what was once rare now becomes common, the perceived value of that work drops to next to nothing.

This is not an original idea. Chris Anderson just published a whole book about it, FREE, the economics of giving it all away.

This is all great, (unless you are a journalist, in which case this spells the end of your career).

Up until now, the vast majority of time and effort spent on the Internet Revolution has been on the content creation side.

Blogging, Vlogging, User Generated Content, eBay. It’s been all about the democratization of the making of content for thew eb.

What we hardly ever pay attention to is the revenue side.

There are 10 million people with 10 million new ideas for web sites, almost all of them content driven. When we ask them about income, the answer is always ‘subscription’ or ‘advertising’.  And now, with Chris Anderson’s book, it seems the subscription model is as dead as The Chicago Tribune.

Now, when it comes to ads, there is probably something there.

But ironically, while we have been very busy rebuilding the content end of the equation, we have paid scant attention to the ad sales side.

We understand that the massively overstaffed and complicated content production model is dead.  But what about the equally overstaffed and complicated advertising and commercial making part?

So far, it has lain untouched… or nearly so, save Adsense.

So maybe it’s time to start thinking about the revenue side – a place most journalists are traditionally loathe to go.

It might be a smart thing to do, because part of the beauty of the web is cutting out the middleman (like Tower Records, for example).

Now maybe we can start to think about cutting out the middleman like Saatchi & Saatchi.

Because maybe if you have a laptop and a camera and a creative bent, you might like to walk into Starbucks and make a 30-second spot for them! (or maybe your local pizza joint).

And maybe, if you have an entrepreneurial bent, you might walk into your local cable operation and buy a few 30-second spots for your ad (which you can then sell back to the pizza guy).

And you know what you are now?

You’re an ad agency, just without the multi million dollar offices on Madison Avenue.

Now, multiply that by the number of people across the country who might like to do this on a part-time basis, like students or housewives or house husbands or freelancers, and you might have, oh, a million people worldwide who might like to do this as well.

And what do you have now?

A viral ad agency.

A viral ad agency for a viral economy.

In the old linear world, the News was made by CBS or NBC and presented by one person at 7pm each night.

One source – many listeners.

In the new viral world of bloggers and twitter, we have a million people across Iran contributing a million bits of information to a hundred thousand platforms in real time.

It works.

Its better and cheaper.

Now, maybe we can harness this same kind of architecture with advertising…

and make some money in the process.

Anyone for a viral ad agency?