Nada Collar

Tumri Cornerstore launched some time at the beginning of this January. But there hasn’t been much information about it around the place. Perhaps the most information is over at 5 Star Affiliate Programs, especially in the forum there.

The idea of Tumri is similar to MyPickList and FavoriteThingz, although from an initial look it appears to be implemented better than those two. It also seems that Tumri is marketing itself towards publishers rather than social network users, so that might help them.

Apparently for users that signed up in January receive 70% revenue share, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is now.

User Experience

One thing I found interesting was that on signing up I had to select my target audience based on gender, education level and average household income. I guess this will help target the widget, but I would have thought that this information would be better to be added when the widget is created. It would seem that I can only have one widget per account, which is not perfect if this is being targeted towards publishers who likely have multiple places (with different targets) they would like to use this widget.

On signing up the site seemed to hang, but I got an email and was able to access my account, so just some small hiccup. On signup there was also mention of a conditions for a “widget sweepstakes”, but the link didn’t seem to have anything related, apart from a small box stating that every 100th signup would give me a free iPod shuffle. I assume a signup is a new publisher (found from my widget) who creates a widget, but who knows.

Once inside the publisher portal Tumri has a very clean looking user interface and creating a widget is fairly simple, however I found that I could not target my widget any closer than a category, unlike the write-up which said I could “select or block CornerStore offers by item, brand, keywords, product category, price break, location, and many other criteria”.

Conclusion

Overall it looks like a product that could be useful with some more work. But given the apparent success of MyPickList and FavoriteThingz they are going to have to work hard.

What does it need? Firstly a blog to inform people of updates (there is a news page on the publishers section which kind of resembles a blog), secondly some decent help (any help at all would be good), and finally and most importantly the ability to actually target certain products like they promised.

View my widget here.

So you have a myspace account. You’ve pimped it out and you get lots of people visiting it. Now you wish you could make some money from it.

Well there are a few people out there who want to help you (Of course they, or at least some of them, would love a cut).

Social Shopping

Social Shopping is probably your best option. Its a fairly new area and so it will undoubtedly heat up. Probably the two main options right now are MyPickList.com and FavoriteThingz.com.

They (and all the other picklist/social shopping companies) are pretty much the same. Select some of your favorite products. Write a short blurb about them. Create widgets and gadgets to show your friends what you like.

Revenue Sharing

However MyPickList and FavoriteThingsz (both supposedly run by the same company) allow you to get a share of the revenue generated by your list. You can select items from anywhere on the net, but only specific retailers will give commission.

Like most revenue sharing sites they pay via paypal once you have accumulated over $25 in credit. From what I can tell they pay around 40% of the commission they get from the retailer. They all cover most large retailers so there is no shortage of products.

Widgets, Gadgets or Badges?

MyPickList has a cool looking flash badge that you can put onto myspace and the many other social networks (Hi5, TagWorld, Xanga, Piczo, Friendster) and even your blogs (Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress). The nice thing about the flash badge is that it will pretty much work anywhere as it is a low risk object compared to say Javascript implementations.

Take a look in my sidebar. I have setup pick lists so you can see the slideshow.

Revenue sharing in its true sense is about sharing the profits with the workers. It used to be profit sharing, and you, the grunt, got a small check from your employer when they made good profits for the year.

Enter the web, fast forward to what I like to call web 1.5, the Google Adsense phenomenon, and suddenly everyone is in the money. Revenue is here, sharing is on its way. Move to web 2.0 and suddenly its all about user generated content. Along the way some less (or maybe more?) greedy people realized that if the user is generating the content, why not give them some of the revenue.

From what I can tell, Digital point forums pioneered the revenue sharing forum concept and code. Digital point is a site for web masters and seems to focus on making money from your website. It would seem natural that such a site would see the potential of sharing the revenue. The basic idea is that for every thread that you comment in you have a chance that your Google affiliate ID is used when that page is viewed.

What is the potential of sharing? If you are reading this article you probably don’t need to be told. Making a user generated site (or indeed any site) successful can be hard work, and a successful site is required to make money. So why not offer an incentive to get users to make your site successful. After all, taking 50% of the revenue and giving away the other 50% is better than getting nothing.

Pay per blog (ie PayPerPost) is another revenue sharing idea, although it deservedly gets much negative attention for not being an obvious paid placement. Google understood the market when they started with paid search placement (they made it obvious to the user that the link was paid). To my thinking it would seem that paying people directly for writing articles of any kind is the wrong focus. On the other hand, paying people for results (ala Affiliates, or Cost Per Action) works. No doubt Google realized this also and felt that people who click on ads when they KNOW they are ads are more likely looking for something that might be found from an ad. After all Google is the master of targeted ads and maximizing revenue.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch recently wrote “PayPerPost is now officially absurd” referring to a new initiative of PayPerPost about disclosure. It would seem PayPerPost is now advising their users to blatantly lie about their paid placements, all in the name of disclosure (as he puts it - a move reminiscent of big tobacco funding tobacco research). If the blogger is feeling particularly honest they also have an option for being upfront about being paid. Nice.

Social Shopping seems to be getting in on the revenue sharing also. Online shopping is where I see some big money and opportunities in revenue sharing. Right now the focus seems to be on social shopping, most likely because everyone is thinking about the success of myspace.com and want to cash in. MyPickList.com is one example.

Given the recent success of YouTube.com I expect to see some new ideas in the video space. At the moment video is what its all about. But video is hard to make ads for, and its expensive to host. But you can bet that google are working on perfecting the the art of contextual video or something similar. In the meantime, pay to make video has started: Revver, Metacafe, Google, Brightcove and it works for some.

Of course the flip side to all this is the argument that a lot of crap gets created when the goal is to make money. You just have to look at Hollywood. The starving artist model seems to work for original content. Hopefully in this case when the distribution network is controlled by the user (ratings etc) most of the crap will fall by the side and the real content will shine through. Google works hard to make sure of that with text, lets hope they can with video.