Remember Squidoo? Founded by current CEO and famous marketing guru Seth Godin, the service allows Internet users to generate rich, topical web pages (dubbed ‘lenses’) to serve as a hub for information, videos, links etc. centered around any given subject. The concept is similar to what companies like HubPages, Mahalo and Helium are all about.
Now Squidoo is looking to monetize the web service directly – rather then depend on on-site advertising – by persuading brands to pay for management of their respective lenses.
In a blog post, Godin shares more details about the new initiative – dubbed ‘Brands in Public’ – and explains why he believes brands will be willing to pay for it.
You can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. You can organize it by highlighting the good stuff and rationally responding to the not-so-good stuff. You can organize it by embracing the people who love your brand and challenging them to speak up and share the good word. And you can respond to it in a thoughtful way, leaving a trail that stands up over time.
That all sounds super duper, and I have the highest respect for the man, but I also have mixed feelings about the way Squidoo is going about it.
Rather than convincing companies to set up their own public profile pages for their brands to aggregate and manage online conversations, Squidoo is creating hundreds of unofficial ones (e.g. for Guinness) in the hopes that companies will come to them and cough up $400 per month for the right to develop the page on their terms. Once a company pays up and gains control over the relevant Squidoo lens, the left hand column will ‘belong’ to them.
This will enable companies to post responses, highlight third-party blog posts, run contests and quizzes, and more. Basically, it becomes a place where companies can both lead, monitor and respond to the online conversations about their brands, which Godin says is particularly helpful when shit storms brew on the Web (whether deserved or not).
I’m not sure I like the fact that Squidoo takes the lead in creating pages for brands only to ‘unlock’ them for a monthly fee afterwards. Sure, there’s some truth to its claim that conversations are happening around the web anyway and they’re merely aggregating them, but I’m sure many will claim that the company is doing this for obvious SEO reasons. Get Satisfaction follows a similar strategy of holding company profile pages ‘hostage’, and has in the past been criticized for that behavior.
I also think a $400/month price point is extremely high for something that can easily be built internally. Squidoo seems to realize this and offers the first 100 brands to sign up a share of the $500,000 in-house ads that the company will run across the site promoting the service and the first partnering brands.
Either way, Squidoo already signed up a number of beta-testers (e.g. Home Depot) and hopes to attract more brands in the near future. The company published an e-book (PDF) about why any company should be considering this, and in it shared some numbers about the Squidoo network size.
Founded 3 years ago (Michael Arrington thought it could become Godin’s ‘purple albatross’ at the time), Squidoo claims it has attracted 400,000 users who hand-built over 1 million pages to date. Squidoo also says it has raised a ’significant’ yet undisclosed amount of capital for charity and is one of the 500 most-trafficked sites on the Web. Looking at the Compete chart below, they do seem to be getting a decent amount of visitors (about 4.4 million a month) even if its two closest competitors both attract a bigger audience at this point.
Robin,
A bold move by Godin. They’ve make some striking changes recently in deleting certain lenses and now this. Defintely trying to clean up their brand. I wish him well but don’t think that squidoo has the clout it once had. We’ll see.
RB
Very true. If Seth thinks this is earth-shattering, then he may have to think again.
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this guy might be good at blogging but running an actual web company is something different.
Well, he set up one of the first online marketing agencies, Yoyodyne, back in 1995 and sold it to Yahoo for $30 million three years later.
What was the whole thing about?
Wonder if companies will take to this. The fee is pretty high and now, with more ways to market on the web, why would anyone prefer squidoo paying a monthly price? (with all respect for Seth Godin).
How drunk was Seth when he cane up with the idea?
not as drunk as you when you learned to spell
waste of time and energy. Squidoo is deadpool ready.
Looking at their example pages you could set one up in a service like Netvibes pretty quickly using RSS feeds from various services. I’m not quite sure what is unique enough about Squidoo to make brands want to pay for it. Anyone know?
okay, so this guy had some clever ideas about ten plus years ago, like jeff taylor with monster (think eons) – and now after a couple of hit books and success in writing, he’s trying to push squidoo into a new realm for content manipulation as a lightweight ad platform….fail…it’s not about the 400 bucks, it’s about the entire concept itself – sites like squidoo are just slightly evolved versions of about.com, or dmoz.com…this is not where the interwebs is going…search is making it far too easy to organize content (think collaborative annotation, filtering, tagging and social sorting) – and so it looks like squidoo (and mahalo and their kin) are evolving themselves into obsolescence…
it was a cool site years ago, but then again so was furl.com, and oh yeah, remember delicious? not one has scaled to massive relevance because they’re all just little feature utility sites built on the back of some other org’s content and product…these approaches make little sense to me, they are not ‘future big companies,’ just feels like a little lifestyle venture for godin and co…sorry, rambling…not awake yet, bad sleep…
I know Seth gives a lot to nonprofits. I’d like to see him give nonprofits a Brands in Public page for free or greatly discounted.
My nonprofit can’t afford Radian 6 and can’t afford $400 a month – but we care about what people say about our services, our fundraising, our web presence, our “brand”. Hope Seth makes it available for the little guy.
Hi Christine… In case you weren’t aware, Radian6 does have special non-profit pricing. Give us a shout if you want to explore it.
Hey Christine, we at Filtrbox give a huge discount for non-profits. Shoot me an email and we can discuss – Mike
A good cash generator perhaps, but certainly not a goodwill generator.
Better would be free pages for brands, pay to remove the ads.
test
The Marketing GURU misses 100%
He better sticks to writing short blog posts.
Agreed that Mr. Godin’s time has come and gone. Squidoo, like Mahalo, is an adsense gimmick.
this seems silly – what about a smaller company (i’ll use me as an example) that has established a presence on Squidoo. Should I have to pay? Its not like having a squidoo page is anywhere near as beneficial as having a facebook page.
Of those 1 million pages about 950 000 are nothing but shills for multi-level marketing.
I really like Seth’s blog and have read 2 of his books but this seems out of character. Like someone told him to start making money with this thing.
It seems a little like extortion wrapped in a more open atmosphere.
The traffic ifor this site is not impreesive at all.
1million pages and 4.4 million vistors per month?
4.4 visits per page.
Who would pay for that kind of traffic.
I had a Squidoo lense for 6 months. Only had 2 page views.
Squidoo is a big waste of time and resources.
Wow ! Look at all of those typos. Should have had a cup of coffee.
Good concept. Wrong way to present it. Also can the company respond to the area’s real time and syndicate additional content. If that’s the case it might be worth something to the brand but not 400.
now clear why the Hell company will pay for maintaining this seth thing. they can go and create there own at a much cheaper price. Check zingoos they do a really good job in this field and that too at relative less cost.
Squidoo gets abused by people all the time trying to increase SEO for their crappy lead gen and sell pages. It’s a slum for many internet markets trying to juice their Page Rank.
If you isolate those page, remove them from the traffic stats, you won’t see much growth or visitors in there.
Brands will pay for it because they will enjoy the ability to “control” the conversation. Sadly they are grossly missing the mark. The real conversations are taking place right now in forums where 2.0 doesn’t live. They’ve been around for years and while you can’t log in with your Facebook account there are real people moving these communities.
By the time they get to sites like Squidoo or Twitter, they get to people who are 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th degree removed.
It’s Seth, so there much be something good in here somewhere but when original ideas get bastardized people lose hope in it (See: Wikipedia)
I love Seth, but I don’t know if he can pull this off. That said, I’m not going to bet against him. I think his team has to find a way to offer more value to the people (not companies) in order for them to choose Squidoo as the participation platform.
Brands In Public stinks… It is a gloryfied exercise in content scraping and I hope Google treats it accordingly. I remember Arrington giving Guy Kawasaki a hard time about AllTop (which has actually turned out to be a very useful service!) – it is time to bring out the big guns for Godin on this one.
You have to admire Seth’s cheek… $400 per month for something an intern could throw together in a few hours! Give me a break.
You can’t win them all Seth – no matter how smart you appear to be.
P.S.
Squidoo is fast becoming a SEO cess pit and Mr Arrington may well be correct about the ‘purple albatross’.
Does Squidoo has a brand dash board for itself ? Squidoo is a brand and there are conversation about Squidoo on the web like the conversation here on techcrunch. It will be interesting to see what a Squidoo brand dashboard will aggregate. If this is such a valuable tool for brands why isn’t Squidoo using it ? I think they should.
I think a lot of people here miss the point of Squidoo’s brand dash board. The service aggregates online conversation on brands which is a convenient way for brands to keep tabs on what people are saying about their brand. It’s a useful market research tool. And I think companies should use it cause it’s free to look. The cost is not prohibited for the companies listed, cost is not the issue, control is. Do companies need to control the dashboard ? Not really, you can’t control the conversation and Squidoo is not the only company that can aggregate conversations. All things considered I would not recommend businesses to rush into signing up for the service. Brands should use their own website as the central source of information. Moreover the Brand Dashborad allows anyone to comment. So if the Dash boards becomes popular a company official can respond to conversations on those pages without paying anything to Squidoo, that’s the way of internet, responding to conversation is free.
-ardentway
http://www.squi...uidoo-in-public
That’s good to see, but it’s kind of odd that currently their own dashboard is not even official, they should update that.
-ardentway
I agree with Ted, Squidoo should offer more to the people because the people drive Squidoo, just like every other social marketing platform. However, if Seth can pull this off… good for him!
Judah Swagerty
Internet Marketer / Entrepreneur Success & Life Strategies Coach
http://www/eBizSuccessU.com
I will write Seth’s next book for him. Building a web business:
1. Setup a site that allows spammers and seo blackhats to create ‘content’ pages
2. act as a proxy for them for google payments
3. say something about charity to get attention
4. build SEO…
5. wait a while
6. take all the big brands, and using your SEO, hold them hostage at $400 a month
7. profit
What I find amazing is that Google has outright banned smaller websites from Adsense for far minor infractions than many of the pages perpetrated as ‘content’ on Squidoo.
Squidoo needs to start paying $400 a month for http://www.squi...uidoo-in-public as there’s a lot of mentions of brandjacking going on.
So, Squidoo is now Merchant Circle?
This reeks of the Internet directories that would set up a listing for you and then send you an invoice making it look like you had signed up for the service on your own. They would then harrass several people in your organization until they found someone willing to sign off on the invoice and send them money.
Sorry, I can’t stand by idly while such travesty is perpetrated!!!! “rather thEn depend” should be “rather thAn depend”.
Its gotta be said: their is no excuse… :)