VigLink

A few days ago, the always awesome Fred Wilson had a an amazing post titled “Affiliate Marketing Undervalues the Click“.

Fred is so dead on, it’s a little frightening. About 1/2 dozen people had sent me the post within a few hours. The quality of the comments on his blog are also among the best I’ve ever seen. We’re only days away from a public announce and the temptation to jump in here is almost overwhelming.

Someone just pointed me to Jonathan Mendez’ great blog post “The Market Forces Killing Display Advertising“.

Obviously we’re not in display, but a bunch of what he writes about resonates for us.

A couple notable things about this post:

• He talks about the “buy side” and “sell side” of the market, something we haven’t seen enough of and something we talked a lot about when we were out pitching for funding.
• He uses the word vigorish. Awesome. Publishers should get their (fair) cut.
• He does some simple models to identify that publishers are being underpaid for the value they’re driving.
• He talks about fragmentation among publishers as a key source of weakness.

Although he’s talking about display, I think a lot of his insights apply to us. The market is ripe.

Question: Is Google killing or saving the newspaper?

For 15 years we’ve been training webmasters to think in pageviews. How many do you have? What are they worth? How can you get more? The fact that nobody can agree on the answer to that question is a symptom of the fact that the pageview does not tell the whole story.

Chris Dixon (of whom we’re big fans) has an awesome recent blog post: “Why Content Sites are Getting Ripped Off”

He cites one of his readers Tim Ogilvie defining the difference between “intent generators” and “intent harvesters” and makes the basic point that only the harvesters get paid and that this is a problem that publishers need to correct. He’s absolutely right and he says it more cleanly than anyone I’ve seen so far. I’m going to be pointing my customers to his blog.

As a publisher, I want to know:

• Where am I sending my users?
• More importantly, what are they doing once they get there?
• How much value is that driving?
• How can I claim some of that value for the traffic I’m providing?

Every time a click leaves a publishers site, value is being created. We call this event “the outclick”. Publishers should be able to claim some of that value. But how do you measure it? How do you “claim” it? These are the problems VigLink will address. Exciting times…