Sprout Commerce, the company behind MyPickList, has launched a new product today, called FavoriteThingz. A widget for social networking sites like MySpace, FavoriteThingz lets users identify their favorite bands, movies and other branded products and display those brands in a nice looking slideshow. Their readers can click through to purchase the same goods and affiliate revenue is split between FavoriteThingz and widget publishers.
After identifying a product category, users select between hundreds of bands, for example, with press photos to display and affiliate revenue percentage listed next to each. Widgets can be customized a bit, which is liable to be appealing. Press photos can also be replaced by any image you chose – which seems like a branding disaster waiting to happen.
The slideshows don’t link out in MySpace any more, so FavoriteThingz has added an HTML link below its flash widget to take users to the full account page of a widget publisher. They say it works well, but I think it’s a serious loss of functionality. Fortunately for FavoriteThingz, MySpace isn’t the only social networking game in town – though it’s close.
Will this type of service take off? Sprout Commerce and many other people think that social commerce is set to be big in the future, not because of the affiliate revenue it generates for users but because of the existential opportunity to associate ourselves with brands. Sounds pretty vapid to me, but if brand association is an important part of being a teenager then FavoriteThingz could be a winner at monetizing it.
This service is easy to use and the widget can look quite nice. Its success will probably come down to marketing. Who can guess what will go viral in the wild frontier of youth oriented online social networking?
Hi guys, i’d like to add on to your review by saying that Favorite things signals that we are definitely in an era where consumers are finally going to start demanding a cut of their ‘ad revenue’. Hurray! Great.
But, this also clearly represents a rather distasteful trend in blatantly pushing people to associate their self image with brands/consumer goods. Can we really take it seriously, or is this to be a good joke about the tricking the ad industry?
An example of how I may use this service: I could choose to put an ad for “apartments.com” and get $3 if someone clicks on the ad, then through favoritethings.com, and then and signs up. I went to apartments.com http://www.apar...affiliateCJ.htm and see that they give $10 bucks or $7 depending, so FavoriteThings is taking a nice cut. I am all for the business plan, but can’t we give users something more to define themselves with in context of these ads? If you’re going to act as the middle man like this can you do something benevolent with that slicing up of the ad revenue pie?
There are a few big challenges I’d imagine FavoriteThings having:
1. Mad parents and ethical no-no’s: There’s no age question on the site that I saw before I put my ‘ads’ on myspace. I would be quite upset if I were a parent and had a kid who put ads on their pages for “becks beer, absolute vodka, date.com, wine.com, etc.’ They do have the genre’s of musicians and sports teams, which is a whole other league if you ask me, because we do find it socially acceptable to define yourself by being a fan of the RedSocks. And, it’s cool if your ‘fanhood’ brings you a little revenue for the clickthrough.
2. Tax/payment structures, etc: How are they going to the 1099s for miscellaneous income for the registered users and how this will all work? I happen to eat dinner with a Harvard-trained tax lawyer working for the IRS and he pointed out, that above very small increments, this type of revenue is indeed taxable income. Maybe they put all this under the what they’ve labled “Legal Mumbo Jumbo”. A whole slew of sites are probably facing this question right now. I just read through their FAQs and learned their tracking by cookies and paying out by PayPal…
3. Click through UI problems: I give favoritethings an A+ for so quickly adapting their badge w/the HTML link for the MySpace link out problem. Fast on their toes. It works oddly though, taking any click right out of myspace and onto favoritethings…and from there you go to the ad…so there’s literally a doubleclick if you wanted to go to the ad. You are also literally bumped out of myspace and have to go back or open a new window. Don’t think that would be popular.
4. Getting blocked by the SNs: I always assumed that these sorts of plays would have to offer the social network a slice of the pie too not to get blocked. We’ll see …but do you think it’s fair to MySpace or Orkut or Blogger to have ads fed on their pages without being able to capitalize on any of it? It’s an interesting question, eh? I’m not adtracking savvy, but I think the industry is going to have to get ready to track in threesomes (feed + page provider + user).
Yub.com (owned by Buy.com) has been around for a long time (and allowing users to associate to brands), but only if you had a Yub profile (but everyone stuck with MySpace – the lure of affil ad dollars didn’t change the lack of a network). They should have become a distributed social network in my opinion, because they’re numbers just keep going down.
ChipIn.com launched earlier this summer with a social commerce payments platform. Their site is pretty clean and they have a payments widget that is being used by a bunch of different sites. It seems their thinking is that groups of people often get together to pool funds for a bunch of different activities. The service seems pretty easy to use and their blog says there’s a bunch more features on the way. Anyone see how they compare to fundable or billmonk?