Squidoo founder and author Seth Godin has backed down on creating company pages by default as part of their new ‘Brands In Public’ service that launched a few days ago. The idea behind the new service is that brands are able to track feedback from customers on a public ‘lense’ (aka. a web page).
Feedback is aggregated from multiple sources, but mostly twitter and mostly by matching against the brand name. The concept itself is not an evil one, but Squidoo setup feedback pages for over 200 brands at launch without the express permission from the vast majority of them. The hitch was that if a brand wanted to control the lense and the feedback, they would have to pay Squidoo $400 a month – and it was that part of the deal that made a large number of people rightfully angry. → Read More
Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. centered around any given subject. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about.
Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service directly – rather then depend on on-site advertising – by persuading brands to pay for management of their respective lenses.
In a blog post, Godin shares more details about the new initiative – dubbed ‘Brands in Public’ – and explains why he believes brands will be willing to pay for it. → Read More
Citizen journalism site Helium has today officially launched its content marketplace after 7 months in beta testing. We’ve covered the service twice before, once in 2006, then last year when Helium Marketplace first opened its doors. Helium offers two services: a user generated content portal that’s part Wikipedia, part Squidoo, complete with revenue sharing. The marketplace works in a similar way to oDesk, Scriptance and similar services, marrying buyers looking for articles to be written, with writers who can supply original content. Unlike similar marketplace services, individual writers are not selected for each job, instead submitting articles against job requests that can then be voted upon by other users. The publisher then selects the articles they want to use from the rank-ordered list. During its beta phase, Helium Marketplace signed up over 100,000 active freelance writers. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with a 20% transaction fee going to Helium. CrunchBase Information Helium Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
News of Google most recent project, Knol, came out late last Thursday without, as far as I can tell, much in the way of press pre-briefings. All the major publications were late to the story. Blogs hit it fast, but had nothing to go on other than the brief blog post put up by Google’s Udi Manber announcing the project. Our initial story on Knol is here. From a product perspective, Knol is not much different than existing products like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine. But Knol isn’t really aimed at Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s much more likely that Google is jealously eyeing the massive traffic that flows through its search engine to Wikipedia. As Nick Carr has noted, Wikipedia continues to climb and climb in search results for many top search terms. More Ad Inventory Needed, ASAP Wikipedia, a non-profit, has stubbornly resisted any efforts to monetize its pages. Google would kill to supply ads to Wikipedia. Barring that, competing with them makes a lot of sense. Google needs to grow revenue to support their valuation. And for that, they need ad inventory. It wasn’t surprising when Google started hosting news directly and allowing comments (that = page views). So the idea of them hosting a knowledge base shouldn’t be surprising, either. Authors have a choice – they can have ads or not. But if they have ads, they can only choose Google. Many authors are going to include ads, and Google will get extra inventory. Delicious Timing Wikipedia has caused more problems than just refusing to take Google’s ads. They are also launching a much anticipated search engine this month via their for-profit arm, Wikia (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hates it when Wikia is called that, but it’s damned hard to tell where Wikipedia ends and Wikia begins sometimes). Google isn’t likely to be particularly scared of Wikia’s new search engine, but it has probably been a little annoying for them to watch all the press about the upcoming “Google Killer.” Google doesn’t usually pre-announce products before launch. in this case they did. Why? Perhaps as a reminder to Wikipedia that competition can → Read More
We’re not sure when it launched, but Fred Wilson has discovered that Seth Godin’s Squidoo has quietly entered the people search field with a new product called Squidwho. Squidwho provides similar features to competitors including Wink, Spock, PeekYou, WikiYou and Zoominfo. Pages include a short biography, Amazon products (where applicable), YouTube videos, Flickr shots, latest news and RSS feed data from appropriate sites. Each page is maintained my Squidoo Lens Guide and offers the same revenue share model as regular Squidoo pages offer. It would be easy to question yet another company targeting people search in what continues to be a hot vertical (even Facebook is now offering public people search), and yet by labelling Squidoo Lens’ under the Squidwho label it’s a logical step for Squidoo. The backend is already in place as are the would-be guides to create the information; in effect the new service is more branding exercise than something completely new. → Read More
A couple of reports across the net suggest that Seth Godin’s Squidoo is being penalized by Google, most likely due to spam on Squidoo pages. The reports indicate that some Squidoo pages have seen a 75% drop in traffic, and in other cases have either been removed from high ranking positions on Google, or removed all together. The service, described last year by Michael Arrington as being Godin’s Purple Albatross, has long been a favorite of black-hat SEO’s looking to drive traffic and gain Google juice for their sites. In more recent times the spam issue has been highlighted by Jason Calacanis, who has written multiple posts on the subject. Squidoo has recently responded to the issue, however given Google’s crackdown it would appear that Squidoo’s response may be a case of too little, too late. Anyone remotely involved with, or following the SEO community for the last 12-18 months would have been fully aware of the issue (or as some see it, the potential), so if Google is punishing or removing Squidoo pages, Squidoo has no one other than themselves to blame for the situation. Squidoo may also now be on borrowed time; being removed from Google or penalized by Google kills traffic, and Squidoo as a content creator would rely heavily on traffic from Google. → Read More
Seth Godin is an exceptional marketing consultant. I’ve read all his books – my favorite is Purple Cow. I routinely bring up his ideas when talking to companies about the best way to get media and early adopter attention: build an exceptional, attention-grabbing product (and if you haven’t, go back and start again). It seems obvious, but most startups don’t think that way. They build something first, then think about the best way to market whatever it is that they’ve built (often by hammering away at journalists and spending whatever capital they have on Google adsense, Overture, etc.). So when Seth put his name behind a new startup last year, Squidoo, people noticed, and expected one hell of a Purple Cow. The Squidoo idea was simple and easy to explain: allow anyone to build a single page, called a lens, on a topic that he or she is passionate about. The person building the lens, the “lensmaster”, gets recognition as an expert in his or her area of expertise, and cash. Squidoo shares a percentage of profits with its authors. Now here’s the problem. If Squidoo doesn’t work out as planned, and I don’t think it will, Seth loses more than his time and whatever capital he’s put into Squidoo. He also loses credibility as an expert in product marketing. To borrow the metaphor, Squidoo could become an albatross around Seth’s neck. Why Squidoo Won’t Work Squidoo is a mixture of evergreen (static) and refreshed content. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a site with evergreen content. Sure, its updated and refined, but the idea is that content on Wikipedia is something that is fairly stable and can be linked to reliably, as I did above. Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of authority for just about any piece of content. With all of this authority and inbound links (traffic), a site like Wikipedia could be massively monetized. Blogs, on the other hand, are the very essence of refreshed content. People go back to blogs every day to see what’s new. Good blogs generate stickiness and repeat customers, which is also a model that can be monetized. An example of a service that combines evergreen and refreshed content successfully is Myspace, which has both static content about a person and blog-like aspects where people can add fresh content. Myspace works, however, because it’s a social network, with pages linking to eachother → Read More
Paul Edmondson, the founder of HubPages in Berkeley, California, thinks Squidoo is onto a good idea, but needs improvement in a number of areas. And he’s in the process of building something he says will be significantly better, both for publishers and readers. Squidoo has basic tools for publishers to create “lenses”, which are topic specific websites. For example, see this site on Web 2.0 by Joshua Porter. The idea is to allow an expert to create a site, combining static/evergreen and refreshed content. Better sites bubble to the top and publishers have the ability to earn a share of advertising. But Squidoo is stingy when it comes to sharing money with publishers. They split profits, not revenue. And they give 5% to charity before splitting profits. We divide up the money we receive in a very public way. First, we pay our bills. That’s direct out of pocket expenses like rent and servers and salary and benefits expenses (our CEO doesn’t take a salary, and neither does our board of directors). Then, with no other deductions, we pay 5% of our post-expense revenue directly to the charity pool, 50% directly to our lensmasters and retain the rest to pay off investors and employees. HubPages is taking a different approach. They are promising more tools to create and promote sites, as well as an aggressive 50/50 revenue split with publishers. Hubpages purpose is to provide easy-to-use tools and traffic to help anyone to produce content and monetize their knowledge by creating webpages. There will be monetization programs to choose from consisting of products, advertisements and lead generation tools that each person can easily incorporate into their pages. Hubpages will split revenue with the content creator. The pages are organized in the Hubpages website based on algorithmic quality index that promotes the best pages throughout the hierarchy (based on tags) of the website. Each author will earn a reputation score called a HubScore that can be referenced to meter the quality of the content by an author. Hubpages will be positioned to take advantage of the significant numbers of new web content providers that want to supplement their income through content like many people do on eBay by selling goods. The Hubpages team is founded by three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup MongoMusic. The team includes Paul Edmondson, Jay Reitz, and Paul Deeds. Most recently, → Read More
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