http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=56452&Nid=27921&p=406600
by Tobi Elkin, Friday, Mar 2, 2007 6:00 AM ET
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS? NO, NOT those kinds of benefits ... cash benefits.
Dada.net, an Italian-based provider of social networking and mobile community services, has partnered with Google's AdSense to launch the "friend$" program that offers bloggers and social networkers a way to earn some cash from their content.
Dada says friend$ attempts to leverage the viral nature of social networks and user-generated content by enabling ads, via Google's AdSense, to appear not only on blogs but around the profiles of consumers' social networking pages. Consumers are invited to opt-in to the program to enable placement of text and display ads on their blogs, profiles, and next to photos and videos.
"The really new thing is the viral aspect," said Max Pellegrini, Dada USA's CEO. "If you invite your friends to participate in this program, you can make money on the clicks and on the pages of your friends. You're incentivized to invite your friends." It's a kind of social networking loyalty program.
So if you're a music blogger and receive an invitation from someone in the friend$ program, you follow the link, opt-in, and wait for approval from Google. The program is not only for use with blogs, Pellegrini stressed, but on the profile pages of Dada.net. Users can rack up their own clicks plus clicks from friends' pages. So people can earn cash not only from Google ads that appear on their own pages, but also from messages that appear on the pages of friends they've invited.
Dada claims that the friend$ program is the first to enable the matching of the AdSense code of social network users which may already exist or can be created from scratch, with the registered Dada.net profiles via a relatively easy method using a single platform.
Google is supplying the ads and managing the inventory, while Dada will manage the real estate on which the Google ads appear and the relationship between "member friend$" on the Dada.net platform.
"Historically, AdSense has been something that publishers use, so this is a little bit unique in that individual people can place the ads on their own pages," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer. "But what that says is the beauty of AdSense is the more traffic you get, the more likely someone will click on the ad and you'll get paid."
But will the clicks add up to something meaningful? "You've got to be pretty popular and have a whole lot of friends to make any significant money from this," Williamson said. "It sounds to me like a really interesting idea, but I wonder how big the revenue potential is both for the individual and Dada."
Social networks are struggling to monetize millions of pages of user-generated content.
"Everybody's trying to figure out what the best way is to generate revenue from social networking. It does make some sense that the individual profiles will start to become a place that social networks will want to tap into revenue possibilities, but I still think in this particular instance, the revenue potential has got to be pretty minimal," Williamson added.
News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last month announced that it bought Strategic Data Corp., an ad technology firm, to help it enhance the value of its ad real estate on MySpace, IGN, AskMen.com, and others among its properties. The company's technology is said to use yield optimization to help publishers squeeze more from each ad served.
Dada, which launched the program in Italy before extending it to the U.S., considers itself an online social networking platform for blogging, dating, mobile communication, and entertainment. The international Dada.net program counts more than 7 million users. Plans include launching the friend$ program in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil in the near-term.
Tobi Elkin is Editor-at-Large, MediaPost. Email her at telkin@mediapost.com
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