Pay-to-view ads

Michael mentioned in a previous posting those once hot dot-coms that paid people to watch ads.

Anyway, following Michael's earlier prompt, how could such an idea be revived again? Clearly, right now, the leader in in this field is freepay.com. This site has you fill out "offers" and then refer a bunch of friends. If all of these friends fill out "offers" then you get a free product. I'm not sure what one of these "offers" entails, but I assume it involves a survey and you giving permission to receive mail for the rest of your life.

What could we do better? Here are some ideas:

1) Focus on college students and recent graduates. An incrediably hot market. And we're young, which leverages our youth as a selling point.

2) Kill referral requirement. For me, at least, this is what stops me from something like freepay. If you were to offer me money or a product for spending my own time, I might do it given a lazy weekend and a low bank account. But I draw the line when it comes to annoying my friends. Of course, we could still reward referrals for those who want to do it. But we don't have to require it.

3) Use a graded focus group model. Instead of simply gathering some demographic stats and an address, what if we present the respondent with a privite wiki. The wiki contains the structure of a marketing plan (including pitch, pitfalls, discussion of the psychology of the target market, and how to position), and a bunch of pages of background material on the product. The respondent is asked to use the background material, and his or own insights and experience, to fill in the blanks of the plan. That is, basically construct a marketing plan web site from scratch. They key is to grade the responses on a scale of 1 to 10. The better your grade, the more money you get. Therefore, these young people have incentive to really put in some effort. If you give some shitty effort, then you might get a couple bucks. If you dedicate an afternoon to polishing some smart ideas, you might make a couple hundred bucks. Intelligence is rewarded. Insight is rewarded. Effort is rewarded. Many students will spend this time. Especially because the activity is engaging and interesting. And companies will kill for this level of insight into their target market. This info would be much stronger than what a focus group would provide. If you gather students into a room for an hour, they will either tune out, or worry obsesively about saying the right thing to be cool in the situation. Give them a web site to build on their own time, and offer them money for their insight, and they'll start turning out some gems.

4) The report variant. The problem with this above idea is that it's too service oriented. Each client requires a new survey, which we get paid for, but requires effort to setup. This could, of course, be very much automated. And the money could be very good for a system that requires very little work to calibrate for each new customer. But another variant is to use some of the funds to run our own surveys, and then anaylze these responses ourselves to generate a youth markeitng report to sell to companies. The advantage of this piece is that selling the same report twice costs as much effort as selling it 500 times. Comparable reports, by the well, currently sell to companies for around $15,000 to $20,000 a pop. A twist on this variant is to first approach some companies to fund the surveying in exchange for getting the report for free and having input on its direction. We, however, are free to resell it to anyone else we want at a nice profit.