Creating Virtuous Cycles

Posted in: Advertising, Blog, Loyalty, Monetization, Virtual Currency on November 24, 2009

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So often in highly competitive marketplaces competitors find themselves in a race to the bottom.

This is certainly true on the Internet for both publishers and advertising networks. For publishers the name of the game is getting as many eyeballs looking at your site at the lowest cost. For advertising networks it’s about creating a profitable margin between the publishers who are constantly getting pitched better rates and advertiser’s who are always looking to cut their payouts.

With some notable exceptions, the eyeball, the actual user of the site, gets lost in the equation. We think the publishers who create the best and most interactive user experiences should be rewarded. Aligning advertising rates with the interactivity of a publisher’s user experience is the challenge that we, here at BigDoor, are working on right now.  We like to call this the Loyalty Economy.

Rather than racing to the bottom, we want to be involved in helping our publisher’s race to the top. Racing to the top is about creating win-win-win monetization strategies that reward user loyalty and participation, rewarding interaction between publishers and users and building on that relationship to create value for trusted advertisers.

Recent events have amply demonstrated that when values are improperly aligned online advertising can become a vicious cycle of manipulative and deceptive advertising begetting poor user experiences begetting cynical and manipulative users.

If values are properly aligned then trusted advertising should beget better user experience which begets engaged and happy users in a virtuous cycle – a mutuality of value for everyone involved in the process.

–Patrick Murck