Category: Intention Economy

The Lack of Intention Economy

“Since the clicks will likely look legitimate, it comes down to intent – did the user click the ad just to click it, or did they have a genuine interest in the advertisement? It’s not so easy to tell…”

Mark Cuban dissects click fraud. The quote above is from the comments following Mark’s post. Good stuff. Reminds me of an interesting bit about Google’s AdSense program. If what they owe an ad publisher less than $10, Google sits on the money. Since the long tail is shaped like a spatula, there’s potentially millions of not quite $10s sitting safely a Google bank account somewhere.

Same goes for Netflix. More than a certain number of DVD shipments per month, and a customer starts to be a liability. Putting faith in customers to sit on a disc for a week or so at a time and it’s no problem. Subscriptions continue to roll in, independent of discs returned.

What if all the click fraud (robots clicking ads) and all the helping-a-friend clicking went away and conversion dropped below 1/10 of 1%?

Seems ad creators have a vested interest in not exposing click fraud – if only to say their ads are “working”.

A Use Case for Identity XML – Demographic Surveys

Stowe Boyd’s running a reader survey. I’ve followed Stowe from Get Real to /Message and thought I’d check out the survey.

Standard demographic stuff; age, gender, household income, zip code, employment status, profession, internet usage, etc. Those common questions attempting to build an anonymous picture of people without actually getting involved with them.

Reading through the questions, the myth of blogs-as-conversation fell away. Stowe doesn’t know who I am – or you are – at all.

If he did, he wouldn’t need to ask these questions – because we’ve already answered them. All of us. Somewhere – if only at the BackBeat Media survey, or in our My.Yahoo.com.

I’d don’t mind giving this info. It’s just annoying to answer the same question twice. I’d much rather just point a URL at the survey.

In the same way I’d prefer to point a URL at my current photo than upload it _again_ to another website (43things, Stikipad, Eventful, or Amazon, Technorati etc).

I’m wondering if there’s an XML specification (or something like it) for the basic identity info all these surveys (read marketers) want. For example:

<BirthYear>1974</BirthYear>
<Gender>M</Gender>
<ZIP>55418</ZIP>
<ChildrenCount>1</ChildrenCount>

I could spin a file with this info, host it, maintain it, and provide brief glimpses into for the right price (so could you).

Yes, this is the Customer as Silo idea, feels like there’s some intention economy connection as well. No, I didn’t complete the survey.