Featured User Comment re: Incentive Promotion

I thought this comment worth highlighting in case any had ideas or interest in helping this reader. In some sense this  is an Incentive 3.0 problem - rather than going for high value goods as a hook, find a value-add product or service where an add supported offer acts as payment. It's very much along Gratis' reasoning for going to Free Pay. This is a one-off need but imagine a platform where ads (filling out offers) was the currency and sites (NYTimes Select for example) could accept payment from this platform instead of hard currency. There are some timing issues involved - consumers would, like a bank account, want to fill it up in advance otherwise there would be a delay between what you want and your ability to get it. The reason being that filling out a credit card offer might earn a user Xpoints in their ad-wallet but those points thake six weeks before populating to the account. They won't want to wait six weeks before reading an article, but they might be willing to wait that long if they were subscribing to a magazine using the ad-wallet / ad-pay platform.

Anyway, on to the actual comment -

Submitted by Chris Parker
I developed a site called up4abuck.com which is a limited entry competition site where users pay $1 for a fixed odds chance to win that competition.  I found the whole asking people for a dollar problematic and have done nothing with the site in over a year. I have always thought that if I could reduce the value of the competition prizes and find a way to generate advertising revenue without taking money from the customer, the current model could be very easily modified and the site could be extremely successful.  I think incentives marketing could be the answer but I have no idea where to find willing advertisers. I know this is a bit cheeky but does anyone have any ideas?

Comments

[Sean Tilak]

Chris,

Another option is to place a Co-Registration path which would show a series of offers to the user, before they would get to the copetition confirmation page. The user will be under no obligation to fill out the offers, but when they do, you get paid.

[Tim Ogilvie]

Try a search toolbar. Their payouts are in the range of $1-2, whether paid on revenue share or bounty basis. While the incentivized nature of the traffic would likely be offputting at first, they have the ability to measure retention and usage to figure out whether it works.

The challenge will be what to offer repeat users. I'll leave that to other posters