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Get Paid to Read Your post in Blogs

Get paid to view ads? Didn’t that fizzle in 2000? In case you forgot, there were a number of companies, of which Alladvantage was the granddaddy, that placed an “adbar” on your desktop, played ads through it and paid circa $0.50 an hour for people to have the adbar on. Most of these companies employed the Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) model to entice people to join — promising huge payouts if your huge downline also used the bar. These companies ended up bleeding money out right and left and not really delivering enough value for their advertisers. Since they all ran on the windows systems common at the time (95 and 98), cheating was rampant, and in my opinion, sped in greatly these companies’ demise.

Now there’s a new way to get paid. It is called Youdata.com, and it allows for the payout to be split between the publisher and the reader.

So what’s different about Youdata? Quite a lot, actually. Basically, the ad widget may be embedded in the publisher’s content, much like google ads. The viewer may choose to split the payout with the publisher, unlike Google ads where the payout is split between Google and the publisher and the reader gets nothing. But the other thing is the targetting. Rather than being based on the subject matter of the publisher, the ads are targetted personally to the reader via a “mefile” (profile). The viewer can choose to see an ad or not, and he knows a priori how much he will be paid to see it. Youdata claims that your profile belongs to you, and is absolutely not accessible to their advertisers. They do not ask for your name or address. They verify you both by email and by SMS-ing a code to your cell phone. If you don’t have a cell phone, they’re not interested in you. I guess everybody who’s worth anything to them has a cell phone.

The other thing is it’s not MLM. It doesn’t need to be. The publisher gets paid and the viewer gets paid.

Youdata is new. I don’t know how well it will work. I haven’t seen it on a lot of blogs and I don’t know how many people would take the time to create a mefile and/or login to read an ad. Let’s see, let my larcenous mind have a go…. Hmmm…. To game the system, people would claim they are interested in really expensive things that they’re not, when what they really want is to get the highest paying ad. It does seem to suffer the same weakness as the schemes from a decade ago, i.e. the people with time on their hands to read ads for quarters are probably not the ones with the ready cash to buy the stuff being advertised. Also, you could lie about your age and gender. It warns you not to by telling you those are not editable. And of course the account gets tied to your cellphone number, so it would be difficult to have multiple accounts. If someone ever figures out a way to hack it to benefit either a particular publisher or viewer, that could be bad for the company.

Once you have a reader account and a mefile you can log in to youdata and get your ads there. You can even download a desktop engine to view your ads there. Or you might run into a Youdata widget on a blog or website. In this case you can choose what share of the payout to leave as a tip for the website owner.

I think this will be great for the consumer. I think it may be disappointing for publishers, because readers will choose not to share any of the booty with them (it’s anonymous and no one’s looking and it’s my experience that people are not nice when they are anonymous and no one is looking). In the second place, any consumer who is serious about this will visit youdata or the desktop engine to plow through all their ads as quickly as possible, so they’ll be all out when they get to the publishers’ blogs; and people who don’t care will not sign up for a mefile in the first place. On the other hand, the publisher doesn’t have to put himself out much to have this widget. Sadly, it does require more real estate than I would prefer. I would like it a lot better if it were a tiny icon that only expanded when you click it. Web 2.0 techniques could make that happen. And I have some other geeky technical concerns that it would take me a whole ‘nother article to elaborate.

Anyway, I put a youdata widget up on my blog as an experiment so you can try it. If you are not logged in to youdata it shows you a signup form. If you are, it gives you a summary of the ads in your queue and you can view them. Check it out and get one for your own blog if you wish. I’ll be curious how it works, both for myself and for others.

I hope it’s clear that I am not promoting YouData and have no connection with them. I just wanted to be the first to alert you to this potential new way of making money.

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