White label social networking software maker ONEsite is launching its very own advertising platform InteractAd today, essentially declaring traditional online advertising is past its prime and that it’s time for social advertising to take its place.
Whether that notion is true or not is subject to debate, but we’ve noted earlier that online ad revenue growth seems to be grinding to a halt.
ONEsite wants to provide an alternative ad platform that leverages community features, content-driven participation and viral elements like relationship and profile data from other social networks (through OpenID-enabled user signup integration with Facebook, MySpace and Google Friend Connect), and introduce intelligent, interactive banner ads that can track who is viewing them and also allow for brand managers to solicit feedback from users throughout campaigns.
InteractAd will only work with online communities powered by ONEsite, which is of course a major limiting factor. Senior VP Thad Martin checked in to say that InteractAd will in fact be platform-agnostic and take advantage of “every scrap of data portability and open technology we’ve gotten our hands on”.
Facebook and MySpace have their own ways of leveraging social relationships to serve more engaging ads designed to increase the ROI of social media campaigns, and companies like SocialMedia, Adknowledge / Cubics, Offerpal Media and SplashCast are hoping to cash in on social network monetization efforts as well across various websites and application platforms.
Also, if social ads are the future remains questionable. One of the highlights of the recent Social Ad Summit was a panel of media buyers who confessed that currently advertiser interest in social advertising is driven more by curiosity than urgency (read this Clickz report for more highlights). With the current economic downturn, it will be interesting to see if that curiosity will prove sticky enough.
ONEsite is one of the pricier proponents in an increasingly saturated market of social network software providers, which includes players like Ning, SocialGo, Mzinga, KickApps, and many more. The company is actually a subsidiary of Oklahoma hosting company Catalog.com and recently forecasted revenues of $30 million by the end of 2009 as a stand-alone business. They claim to power 3,000+ communities mounting up to almost 5 million members.
This is a good idea….the only problem is that they are not open source is this means vendor lock in….Also are they going to give members anything back for the content they give that could make ONEsite have a high valuation.
Our social network is Open Source. We will also have a white label hosting service, and we have had a stand alone ad system for our members for more than a year.
Some of the features are:
A top of the line Read/Write/Re Publish feed reader.
A stand alone advertising Network
Integrated Classifieds Service
Integrated Music Store (Using SongBird)
Integrated Application Store
Integrated Products sells and Product affiliate sells service
Integrated e-commerce service (Handles Micro Payments and Revenue Sharing)
Super Distributed Micro Blogging Service “Conversations”
what is yours and how can we talk
That is a very interesting move from Onesite ! Pure advertising model (for social media) is still not as thriving a business model as it has the potential of being. Facebook-like targeted advertising could be useful. The market is still waiting for a leader in the social media advertising space. Could it be InteractAd ? I guess time will tell !
This is interesting, but social data alone is just one more source for a targeting engine. The question is what kind of interaction are they enabling from the banners? Spongecell is building ads that provide utility to consumers by giving them tools they can use inside the banner.
Most of the web is now two-way, so why aren’t more advertisements? There’s ROI (beyond branding and clicks) to be unlocked in the impressions that advertisers are already buying.
@william
What is this serve you talk of? Please contact me.
@Raj I agree that the level of targeting available on the Facebook platform is promising, but the reason advertisers aren’t seeing the returns they were hoping for is that traditional marketing agencies have an approach that doesn’t fit.
Couple that with the fact that the inventory is overpriced – as determined by the value advertisers can recognise from it – and you have a model that is doomed to fail.
Our approach is very different to this, and so we are finding that it *is* a powerful and high-ROI ad platform. Handled properly it can be extremely compelling to all advertisers, but getting the approach right isn;t going to be easy for the larger agencies.