We are of course interested in finding ways to generate money out of connotea, while at the same time keeping the service free, open and keeping your data open. The obvious first step at doing this is online advertising. At the moment on some select connotea pages we display google ads, but for some reasons the targeting of these adverts to the specific content is not strong.
We have been in discussion with a Munich based company called Proximic about providing an alternative solution to google. (By way of disclosure MacMillan, the company that owns Nature, is owned in turn by Holtzbrinck, and Holtzbrinck is a shareholder in Proximic).
The Proximic guy’s are good, and I’ve rolled out a demo of their technology on a dev version of connotea. You can have a look at it here.
Next to each bookmark you will see a small “Prox it” link. This is a piece of javascript that when you click on it indexes that link and pulls related content from a number of sources indexed by Proximix. These can include related information, along with related advertisements.
When we roll this out we hope to be able to include chanels with information such as nature news, perhaps links to nature articles, as well as related ad links, that I hope will be of value.
The “Prox it” link text is going to be changed on the live site to give a better indication of what the link provides, and after we roll it out we will start indexing what we hope will be sources of information of interest to you.
I am a firm believer that the value of such efforts will be measured by how much you use a system like this. We are going to roll it out, and over the next few months work on making the content indexed as relevant to you as we can. I think the proof will be in the pudding, and I hope that we can serve up a reasonably sweet dessert.
Let me know what you think!
Ian,
A challenge many of us face. I just gave Proximic a try. Seems to be quite similar to Sphere, but with less noise content. It’s going to be a challenge to get people to click on it though, but you can only find out one way :).
Question … is there a clear differentiation between sponsored links and real links? I couldn’t quite tell in the couple of examples I tried
Hi Deepak,
The content buckets at Proximic are walled off from each other, and they give us a lot of flexibility to map from these buckets to what they call channels on the widget. This ability to fine grain the content, and to work with them on this, is one big plus over google.
At the moment we have not set up the buckets at their end, but will start doing so soon.
I’m thinking initially at a 50-50 split between related content that we provide, and open advertising.
I agree that getting people to click on the link is going to be a challenge, but yes, only one way to find out!
Here is another business opportunity for Nature ;). Developing or co-developing a good science ad network . There is a lot of information to mine specially in biocompare and Nature Methods/protocols that could be use to improve some kind of vertical ad network. Maybe getting in touch with Google or these guys from Prox It.
The Prox It looks interesting. I look for related articles in Pubmed all the time when I am researching a subject. Once clicked it also gives you a lot more potential space to put info right in front of people.
I would agree with Pedro. As someone who carries ads and has a web startup, I often feel frustrated by the lack of a good scientific ad exchange. I would love to be a web publisher for such an exchange. You could even build it on top of openads
Anyway, I digress. In the proxit case, I think a 50-50 split would probably be a decent start