You may remember The Million Dollar Homepage. - the internet phenomenon where an enterprising student sold each pixel on his website for a dollar. But what happened to it? And what about those opportunistic advertisers who invested in its real estate?
On hearing about My Hex Colour (a site where, in exchange for a dollar, you can become the proud ‘owner’ of your favourite hex code colour), Kelvin at SiteVisibility revisited the godfather of the genre.
In fact, any idiot can look up milliondollarhomepage.com and reassure themselves that the most garish site on the web is still intact. More interesting is what Kelvin dug up on its advertisers.
According to Kelvin’s analysis, 16% of the site’s links are now pointing at 404 error pages, with another 12% redirecting to other websites.
So what can we learn from this? For one thing, online marketing is not just about links and clicks. Million Dollar Homepage may have resulted in a traffic spike for those sites that chose to advertise, but I’d be interested to know how many of those random clicks were converted into engaged visitors, let alone loyal customers.
Given that nearly a third of the original links are no longer operational, I’d suggest that those businesses who focused purely on traffic volume rather than qualified visitors have not been successful long term.
As Kelvin suggests there may be incremental SEO benefit from backlinks, given that MDH was itself linked to by trusted sites like the BBC. However, most of those clicking on sites like Million Dollar Homepage arguably do so out of curiosity, not because they are interested in developing any sort of relationship with the advertiser - particularly when creative is limited to generic messages like ‘dating’.
Ultimately if you want to turn those clicks into customers, you need to be focusing on relevance, not just reach.
Dan Ariely’s blog highlights how Google’s autocomplete can be used to reveal some interesting insights about what matters to us most:
“For better or for worse, Google’s obsession with collecting and refining data has given us a window into each other’s fascinating and telling curiosities.”
Ariely’s above example suggests how automplete could be used to identify key concerns around brands or political leaders. But perhaps just as interesting is which of those phrases Ariely was searching on in the first place…
There was a great film on SBS last night called Rip: A Remix Manifesto.
The documentary follows filmaker Brett Gaylor and mash-up producer Girl Talk as they travel the world to fight for their right to party and poke fun at the litigious nature of major record labels. Interestingly, the filmaker has also posted the footage online and is encouraging others to download it, pay whatever they choose (a la Radiohead) and then remix it themsleves.
Gaylor bases his case against copyright around the following four assertions:
Culture always builds on the past
The past always tries to control the future
Our future is becoming less free
To build free societies you must limit the control of the past
The first point is communicated in a particularly engaging and persuasive fashion. Whether it’s a modern adaptation of Shakespeare or sampling the Rolling Stones, reworking established themes is ingrained in cultural progress and often inspires new audiences to discover the original artist.
While I’ve always been a big fan of the remix, sadly at times the film runs the risk of confusing the case for creative sampling with straight-forward copying.
Sure, the record companies missed a huge opportunity around digital distribution and have handled the rise of illegal file sharing badly. But even if many of us have taken advantage of peer-to-peer file sharing, ultimately I think we recognise that artists need to get paid for the music they produce.
Regardless of your views on Britney Spears, prosecuting a 15 year old girl for downloading her music is clearly not the answer. But neither is simply championing our right to download whatever we want for free.
Sustaining a culture of creativity means finding ways to reward those that create. And that means labels and artists embracing a model that offers easier access to music at a fair price, one that reflects the reduced cost of digital distribution. Think Spotify..
Watch the first part of Rip! A Remix Manifesto above, or check out the whole film here.
The word ‘engagement’ gets used a lot by marketers these days - in fact a few new synonyms would be helpful for the digital strategy I’m working on at the moment.
For a lot of brands, creating content that consumers want to engage with is absolutely the right approach, particularly if it’s around a shared passion or topic that people actively want to discuss.
However, it’s easy to forget that in many of the purchasing decisions we make every day, we don’t want to be engaged, we just want to get it done with minimal fuss.
Rory Sutherland has a great piece on his blog about this phenomenon: his argument is that most people make most of their decisions based on minimising risk rather than optimising choice. In other words it’s not about making your brand the best - it’s about being the least likely to be shite. As a consumer, this is the difference between being a ‘maximiser’ and a ’satisficer’:
“If you are an expert in a field, you are a maximiser. Your car is Teutonic. You listen to relatively obscure Indie music. You wear niche clothes brands, like those funny jeans with a wiggle on them…But most people tend to be maximisers in a few areas only - for most of us it’s simply too much intellectual effort to compete in every field.
Now, here’s the issue. Most people, in most fields of consumption, most of the time are NOT maximisers at all. They are something completely different. They are satisficers. What they are doing is not using insane amounts of mental energy to attempt to optimise every decison. They are instead simply trying to avoid making a decision that is actually bad or which might cause them to look or feel foolist. For those people, good enough generally is.”
This doesn’t mean do nothing. Using compelling content to increase your online visibility and credibility can be a great way of engaging the ‘maximisers’ while also making you seem less risky in the eyes of the ’satisficers’.
Ultimately, it’s about understanding your different audiences and tailoring messaging accordingly. And as the the Fina ad cleverly acknowledges, it’s worth remembering that most of these people probably don’t care as much about your brand as you do.
If you haven’t already done so, it’s worth checking out Seth Godin’s eBook What Matters Now.
Available as a free download from Seth’s blog, the eBook brings together ideas, predictions and a healthy dose of navel-gazing from 70-odd top bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurial types.
My favourite entry so far is a reality check from Howard Mann. Reactionary? [...]
UPDATE 18/12/09: Get your free Flavors.me invite code here:
Just go to flavors.me/signup and enter invite code ‘nextlevelideas’ to try it out for yourself.
In the spirit of seamless segues, I’m kicking off the new blog design by mentioning a forthcoming social media enterprise that is also all about the content - Flavors.me.
Currently in beta, Flavors.me is [...]
Like many people with a blog, I don’t update it as much as I’d like.
Recently I’ve been trying to convince myself that this was not a result of my own laziness. Rather, I concluded that my previous image-led, magazine-style design was better suited to long-form articles than short posts and links. Predictably, this realisation resulted [...]
Vegemite’s decision to name its new variant ‘iSnack 2.0′ has stimulated a lot of debate on Twitter and Australian marketing blogs in recent days, culminating in Kraft’s decision to axe the name just four days after it was unveiled.
‘iSnack’ bombed because the name has no relevance to the product, coming across as an opportunistic attempt to jump on the Apple / web 2.0 bandwaggon.
One company that has a better record in this area is Ford…
You may remember The Million Dollar Homepage. - the internet phenomenon where an enterprising student sold each pixel on his website for a dollar. But what happened to it? And what about those opportunistic advertisers who invested in its real estate?
The word ‘engagement’ gets used a lot by marketers these days - in fact a few new synonyms would be helpful for the digital strategy I’m working on at the moment.
