Dear gerth,
Let me begin by addressing your question as to the length of time it takes
to get a question answered. Since this answering service operates on an
open bidding system, Researchers are free to pick and choose questions
as they like. A question will go unanswered usually because it would
take too much effort to answer, because it requires highly specialized
expertise, or simply because it gets overlooked by qualified Researchers
who have other interesting questions to work on. Remember that you can
always set an early expiry date on time-sensitive questions. I do find
this question of yours very interesting, and I am available at last to
answer it, so here goes.
Your hypothetical storage service has a strong appeal to me personally. I
am a frequent computer user, making heavy demands on my equipment and
working from multiple sites, so I would be very interested in a website
offering massive storage for free. I imagine there would be some sort
of hidden cost in the form of ad exposure, but as long as this wasn't
too onerous and the site seemed solidly put together, I would be eager
to sign up for stable, secure storage that I could use for remote backup
and as a clearinghouse for file transfers while working on the road.
Your problem, of course, is how to reach users such as myself. Your
advantage is that it is much easier to attract someone to a product
or service if they have a preexisting, unfulfilled need for it than to
persuade someone that they need a product or service that has not yet
caught their fancy. As my colleague notes in his Question Clarification
above, and as a user notes in a Comment below, there are ways to reach
your audience other than straight advertising. A marketing campaign can
involve, in additional to conventional commercial placements, strategies
such as: a public-relations effort; word of mouth, today known by the
hip phrase "viral marketing"; and corporate partnerships with companies
that offer a complementary service.
I shall indeed mention a few resources for ad-free marketing
later. However, I first want to discuss the more routine business
of purchasing advertising space on the web. By now there are several
well-established ways to do so, and your main challenge is to decide
which advertising venues would serve the highest concentration of your
target audience for each dollar you spend. The two principal ways in
which you can pay for a web ad are PPM and PPC.
In the abbreviation PPM, the M is the Roman numeral for one thousand,
so PPM stands for Pay Per Thousand. This is a term borrowed from the
old-media advertisers of Madison Avenue, befitting the conventional model
of the PPM system. The thousands of things that you're paying for are
impressions. In a magazine or newspaper, the number of impressions is a
statistical approximation that takes into account the circulation numbers
of the periodical and the probability that people will see a given spot
on a given page. On billboards and on television, the numbers are even
hairier. On the web, PPM has a seemingly straightforward interpretation:
each time a browser requests the page containing your advertisement, it
counts as an impression. Determining how that translates into pairs of
eyeballs is an arcane art, however, since web surfers are not necessarily
reading your ad in its entirety or even taking notice of it. However, PPM
advertising can be purchased for a few dollars per thousand impressions,
and if there's a sharply focused site whose audience exactly meets your
expectations, showing them your ad can be a good investment.
The other popular system is PPC, which stands for Pay Per Click. Here, you
pay each time a user clicks on your ad. This is a much more quantifiable
effect than a mere impression, since the user reacted to your ad and is
at the least curious about it. The added value of a click means that it
costs much more than a single impression or even ten impressions, given
the low rate at which impressions turn into clicks. Perhaps the most
precise ad-payment model is PPA, or Payment Per Action, in which you
pay each time someone follows up on the advertisement by registering
with your site or by making a purchase. The reasons why PPA is not
widely implemented are technical as well as legal and psychological. It
is not easy to arrange matters in such a way that each party in the
advertising transaction, namely the agency and the ad purchaser, can
confirm that an action was indeed carried out by someone who saw the
ad. There are of course tools such as CGI and cookies, but in the end,
absent some serious cryptographic intervention, it is a question of
trust. The ad agency must either trust that the ad buyer is reporting
all transactions originating from the ad, or the ad buyer must entrust a
significant part of his ordering or registration system to the care of
the ad agency. Either way, it's a touchy affair open to much suspicion
and foul play in the cutthroat world of e-commerce. A final method but a
rather scarce one for purchasing ads is to prepay for a fixed period of
exposure on a website. There is no attempt here to measure how many people
saw or responded to the ad, at least not on the advertising agency's part.
Your basic choices for payment, then, are PPM and PPC, which are
alternatively known by the names CPM and CPC for cost-per-thousand and
cost-per-click, respectively. Most sites offer one or the other, and a
few offer both. In addition to taking that choice under review, you must
carefully consider your target audience. Do you want to attract business
types and professionals to your hypothetical free storage service, or
is it home consumers who would use it casually for entertainment purposes?
If I were to launch such a website, I would not attempt, at least
initially, to target the corporate crowd. Enterprise users are
very finicky about such things as security, long-term reliability,
and legal liability. They like to enter into binding contracts with
incorporated information-service providers rather than trust their data
to a free-registration system. This is why you don't see many serious
service providers setting up shop on GeoCities. My choice of target market
would be the computer-literate, tech-savvy, possibly geeky types who would
know what to do with remote storage but wouldn't place enterprise-level
demands on it. The average computer user probably wouldn't understand at
first glance what remote storage is good for, and once it was explained
to them, they probably wouldn't have any real use for it.
One group of people who do tend to have a need for remote storage
are those who own many digital gadgets. In addition to being more
computer-literate in general, gadgeteers use devices that consume or
generate digital media in large quantities. Digital cameras and camcorders
produce many megabytes' worth of image files that proud pet owners and
parents want to share with friends and relatives, while PDA users like
to share data with each other or back it up from the road. A good venue
for your ads would therefore be something like Gizmodo, which caters to a
heavily wired crowd constantly on the lookout for new models and new uses
for their cellphones, cameras, laptops, portable audio devices, and PDAs.
Gizmodo
http://www.gizmodo.com/
The site's advertising page provides a demographic breakdown as well
as information on ad types and rates. You can take out a graphic ad on
a PPM basis, or you can just prepay a lump sum to have your ad carried
on the site for a fixed span of time. You can also purchase inexpensive
text ads on the lump-sum, fixed-time basis.
Gizmodo: Advertising with Gizmodo
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/advertising-with-gizmodo-008027.php
Gizmodo's ads are served by an advertising network called MarketBanker,
which lets you target individual sites or whole categories of sites.
For a high-tech service such as remote file storage, I believe it would
be wiser to select individual sites. MarketBanker's Technology category,
under which there are several subcategories, is shown here.
MarketBanker: Technology
http://dir.marketbanker.com/index.cgi?fastget=fg&a=1.37.1.1&search=&all=0
To target digital-camera users, who have a very specific and often
urgent use for remote storage and file sharing, I would post on one of
the digital-camera review pages with which I'm familiar.
Digital Camera Resource Page: Advertising
http://dir.marketbanker.com/index.cgi?fastget=fg&a=1.37.1.1&search=&all=0
Digital Photography Review: Advertising
http://www.dpreview.com/misc/advertising.asp
Another select audience consists of people who often download software
of the shareware, public-domain, and open-source varieties. The same
users are much more likely than the run of the mill to upload their own
software, so there's a greater probability that they'll be interested
in remote storage and file sharing. One popular software-download site
that deals directly with ad buyers is Tucows, which caters to users and
providers of software libraries.
Tucows: Home
http://tucows.com/
Tucows: Corporate Page
http://www.tucowsinc.com/
Although Tucows has an elaborate advertising program in place, you can
simply purchase a thousand impressions of a 120-by-90-pixel button for
$5. A vertical banner costs $10 per thousand impressions.
Tucows: Advertising Philosophy
http://advertise.tucows.com/
Tucows: Rate Card
http://advertise.tucows.com/ratecard
A popular alternative to centralized remote sharing is the use of
peer-to-peer file sharing networks. If you want to advertise through this
competing technology, you can push ads to users of the free Kazaa client.
Kazaa: What "Ad-Supported" Means
http://www.kazaa.com/us/help/faq/howis_kazaa_free.htm#gain
Advertising on the Kazaa client is administered by the GAIN Network,
whose parent company is Claria.
GAIN Publishing: Advertise
http://www.gainpublishing.com/global/advertise/
Claria: Advertise
http://www.claria.com/advertise/
File-sharing buffs like to congregate in forums and bulletin boards. To
reach them here, you would contact the forum operators directly to make
an advertising agreement. For example, Zeropaid offers text ads at $1
per thousand impressions.
Zeropaid
http://www.zeropaid.com/
Zeropaid: Advertising
http://www.zeropaid.com/php/ads/
The users who perhaps best understand the use of remote storage and need
it the most are open-source consumers and software developers. To reach
them, I can think of no better venue than Slashdot. Both are part of what
was once known as the Open Source Development Network (OSDN), recently
renamed the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG). To buy advertising on
their hottest property, Slashdot, and on the similarly user-oriented
sites freshmeat and NewsForge, you would work with the OSTG advertising
department. I think Slashdot in particular would be an ideal choice of
venue for advertising the kind of service you envision.
Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/
OSTG
http://www.ostg.com/index.htm
OSTG: Advertising
http://www.ostg.com/advertising/
Many other websites that attract power users, technology addicts,
and file-sharing enthusiasts use text ads served by advertising
networks. These are run either manually by an advertising agency like
MarketBanker, which works with the ad buyer to select particular sites and
groups of sites, or, in the case of Google AdWords, they are automatically
placed by a proprietary algorithm that matches the content of a web page
with the content of an ad. You have most likely seen AdWords alongside
your search results, but what you may not have realized is that many of
the simple, informative, precisely targeted text ads you see throughout
the web are served by the same context-sensitive technology. I have no
special knowledge of how the algorithm works and I have never used AdWords
myself, but let me refer you to pages addressing prospective buyers.
Google Adwords
https://adwords.google.com/select/
Google Adwords: How much does AdWords cost?
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6382&hl=en_U
Google Adwords: Where will my ads appear?
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6119&hl=en_US
An interesting alternative to pushing ads toward web surfers is to let
them pull ads through their news readers. One technology that does this is
called Pheedo. By selecting news feeds that cater to your target market,
you can be sure that your ads are reaching the right audience.
Pheedo Advertiser Services
http://pheedo.com/services_advertiser.htm
I would trust Pheedo with my business because it is a venture of the
Kalsey Consulting Group, whose SimpleAd Exchange I have used in the past
to draw websurfers to my blog. The technology is easy to use, reliable,
and I know from experience that short text ads really do work. People read
them because they require little mental processing, and they respond if
your subject matter matches their interests. The SimpleAd Exchange is
designed for personal websites, so you should not use it to promote a
commercial service, even a free one, such as you describe. If, however,
you start a blog that talks about your interest in such a service and your
efforts to build it, link sharing might be a good way to attract readers.
SimpleAds
http://blogsnob.simpleads.net/
You can also get free publicity for a remote-storage service in a legal
and ethical way by getting tech sites to cover it editorially. For
example, you might submit a press release directly to Slashdot. Although
the odds of acceptance are generally slim, I believe that remote storage
is much more interesting to Slashdot readers than most advertised
products.
Slashdot: FAQ: How do I submit stories to Slashdot?
http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed100
The best way to get your website covered is to have other users talk
about it and eventually submit stories or news bulletins to Slashdot,
NewsForge, and similar sites. One powerful and inexpensive way to do so
is to start a blog. The best method of all, however, is to simply run
a reliable free service and let the word get around on its own. A good
product sells itself, really. On the web, Free Storage is as powerful
a call as Free Beer.
I hope the results of my research are helpful to you. If you feel that any
part of my answer is incomplete or inaccurate, please post a Clarification
Request so that I can assist you further and meet your needs before you
assign a rating.
Regards,
leapinglizard |
