Category: Marketing

A few weeks back I made big news and landed on TechMeme for pointing out that ZeFrank’s Gimme Some Candy promotion had been dropped by Google Checkout for not selling an actual product. In the end, this worked out for Frank’s benefit as many of his Canadian users pointed out that Google Checkout was not open to residents of Canada anyway. He moved his promotion to PayPal and it has (by all accounts) been a large success both for Frank and his viewers who are more than happy to pay for duckies (even me).

Now, it looks as if Google Checkout is going international (heading off Zanox at the pass, perhaps?). Why is this important? Think of the vertical channels, content creation/aggregation (YouTube and Wiki’s) and the limited scope Adense to adequately encompass the growing canon of user content. The international factor is a logical extension of where Google is heading with its Advertising Operation System.

Garret Rogers writes:

Since I live in Canada, purchasing or selling items on Google Checkout is not an option. I really wanted to check out the new “email invoice” feature they just announced today, but I’m unable to sign up as a seller.

Bitter, I decided to poke around in the source code to see what I could find. It turns out they are getting ready to open up the service to Canada, and probably other countries soon. When you are in the signup form for Google Checkout, you can type this javascript into your address bar to reveal a Canadian signup page — unfortunately I’m still unable to register.

This is potentially a very important issue as Google seems to be amping up Checkout for the Holiday and early 2007 season with major discounts available to consumers in partnership with participating merchants.

Google is heading into CPA next year and it’s going to be a much larger scheme than we’ve imagined in all of our pontificating!

Adify is an interesting new player in the video space. Underneath the heading of “Community Driven Ad Networks,” their blog states that:

At Adify, we are developing a business model that “wraps around” this emerging form of content creation with a unique set of services for supporting monetization. Our community networks are designed to enable any participant – publisher, advertiser or user / enthusiast – to benefit directly from helping in the advertising sales or support process. We think that this is a breakthrough model with the same potential to democratize the business side of online media.

Of course there are alternatives for anyone seeking to spread the use of their video in either a specific vertical or across many channels. Today, however, Adify entered into a partnership with vSocial to allow publishers the option of publishing, branding and spreading their user generated content.

vSocial is a social networking for video platform that enables content owners, site operators and online marketing organizations to custom brand, target, virally distribute and monetize their message via video, so this partnership makes for an interesting platform for publishers looking outside the Revver or YouTube models.

According to the press release, this partnership shows some differentiation from competitors by enabling the publisher to include advertising through ease of use:

“Enabling in-video advertising is the next logical step in the evolution of the online video space,” said Mark Sigal, CEO and co-founder of vSocial. “By integrating our vConnect video platform with Adify’s advertising platform, we are giving video publishers a simple way to create value around their content and their brand in a manner that harnesses the power of social networking to create greater reach than has been available in the past.”

The biggest problem I see with this new platform is the reluctance many publishers may have for turning over their content to serve ads which they have limited or no control over. Revver has done a decent job at confronting this worry by allowing some control of ad content, and by building up its own brand since well-known “vlogs” are using the service.

While attempting to bring some democracy to video generation, this partnership still has a few questions of ad-relevancy and long term vision to make clear before publishers begin signing up.