Advertising

As I promised you earlier, it's time to bring up the ugly topic of advertising again!

Much earlier in this website, I mentioned two basic internet strategies to find commercial success for a non-retail website: ( 1) offer the basic service for free, but provide advanced features for a small monthly fee and (2) offer the service for free —and be totally free of advertising to attract members—then put in the advertising when members are too addicted to move away.

Given that Consensus is going to be primary designed as a communication tool for the non-profit world, I'm having a little trouble seeing future non-profit members being willing to pay for advanced features when the basic feature is serving them quite well. Unless the project manager can concoct a commercially acceptable advanced feature package to fund Consensus, I think we have to rely on advertising.

First off, Consensus should not trick you by initially not having advertising to get you addicted to this SNS, then put in the advertising. Rather, we are going to be honest: some advertising will be necessary to pay the bills: salaries, office expenses, server rental, programmers, etc. The advertising will be an integral part of Consensus from the start. But not in the way you know it!

By now, you have noticed those two small ads on the right side of this webpage. The ads are far away from the central focus of these webpages, yet the ads changes out are brings a fresh look to each new webpage. You have to admit that your eye has wandered over to those ads from time to time.

This is a great example of ergonomic ads on the internet! Consensus should develop a similar style of advertising to pay all the bills and keep Consensus free to use for its members. Would not this small advertising space in the corner of a Consensus webpage be a good tradeoff to make for a free and useful internet service?

The adshow you see on these webpages come from one of my inventions: DVO Advertising. This online advertising software was mostly inspired by the advertising revenue from my previous ad broker. I have given up on this ad broker and its look-alike competitors: the revenue was paltry and many of the ads are tacky and distracting to my inventions. I decided it was better to have my inventions advertising for each other (with classy ads), rather than have outside advertisers through this broker. So I invented DVO Advertising, which I have been implementing throughout my website.

I recommend that Consensus adopt DVO Advertising as its advertising medium for four reasons.

1. DVO Advertising is quite easy and inexpensive to set up, allowing the PM to put early programming resources towards other necessary features to make Consensus great.
2. Consensus can choose the ads to show on Consensus. If a prospective ad does not fit with the image Consensus wants to portray, the ad space is not sold to that advertiser.
3. Consensus sets the rates and gets all the revenue. Rates can be designed to give non-profit clients a “preferred price.”
4. Consensus can use unsold ad spaces to advertise for itself.

Click here to get more information about DVO Advertising.

Would you like to get your message to future fans of Consensus? If so, you can learn about buying ad space on Dave Volek's Consensus by clicking here.