It's called PermAds and their little tagline/catch phrase sums up their concept pretty well: "Because advertising doesn't have to be a monthly expense". That automatically perks up the ears of anyone like me who is poor and destitute.
From the PermAds FAQs page:
PermAds are a new way of thinking about web advertising. We asked ourselves "Is web advertising something that every website has to budget for every month?" and we decided the answer was "No". PermAds were born out of this question and a desire to see a revolution take place in the web advertising industry.
For the technical, rather than philosophical, answer, PermAds are permanent advertisements. Advertisers pay for a PermAd and they never have to put any more money in that ad if they don't want to. Advertisers don't pay per-click, per-impression, per-action, or per-anything. The PermAd will permanently be displayed as a search result for an advertiser-selected keyword or keyphrase.
OK, so digging through the marketing and legalese, PermAds is basically offering permanent web advertising to advertisers. I've honestly never heard of anyone offering something like this before. You don't often find permanent anything on the web, so that in itself makes PermAds a rare find. But the real question is - is it worth it?
Well, they are currently running a promotion where they offer 5 PermAds Points (their site-specific form of currency) free to all new accounts. They display their ads ordered by PermAds Points value. So, you could take their free points and make five small 1-point ads or one big 5-point ad. Either way, you don't have much to lose when advertising is free.
Now, of course, they have to make money somehow too, right? They make money by offering people the ability to purchase additional PermAds Points for $1.00 each. So, if you find somebody else has put up a 5-point ad for "video games" then you're going to have to shell out at least $1.00 to be able to put up a 6-point ad (5 free points plus 1 additional purchased point). One welcome addition here is that they don't require any minimum purchase of PermAds Points. I can just buy 1 point for $1 if I wanted. On a related side note, their payments are processed through PayPal, which, honestly, I often feel safer paying through PayPal than giving my credit card number directly to a business anyway.
The site apparently just launched because the 5 free PermAds Points are part of an introductory deal to get people to sign up. The upshot of this is that there aren't a ton of ads on the site right now. So, you can probably get your link listed as the first search result for your chosen search phrase pretty easily and probably using only the 5 free points. If this idea really takes off and advertisers flock to PermAds then you may have to throw a little extra money at your ads to maintain your search positioning in the future. Of course, if PermAds doesn't take off then you end up with a permanent top-ranked search result for your troubles.
The PermAds ad management interface is simple and bland, but functional. It doesn't have some of the niceties of other web 2.0 sites, but it still works well for what it does. You can input a particular search phrase and if you untick the "Limit to My PermAds" checkbox it will list everyone's ads that are competing for your search phrase. Not only that, it shows what each ad's value is in PermAds Points. It is rare that an advertising system will let you directly see what ads are competing with yours, so be sure to use this information to your advantage. What this means is that you can easily find out exactly how much value you need to add to your PermAd to get it to display in the position you want. Also, be sure to read about their Linked PermAds feature on their FAQs page. Linked PermAds are essential to easily displaying a single ad as a result for multiple search phrases.
Another nice feature PermAds offers is referrals. Basically, if you get someone to sign up for the service using your special referral link or mentioning your username during the sign up process, they are tagged as one of your referrals. What that means is that whenever one of your referrals purchases PermAds Points you get some points for free (half of however many they buy, to be exact). Referrals also work on multiple levels so if a referral of one of your referrals buys points, you will get one quarter (i.e. - half of half) of however many they bought. You'll get 1/8 of the points purchased 3 referrals down, and so on. So, basically, if you refer lots of people to the service it will be easier and cheaper for you to keep your own ads on the top of the search results because you'll earn plenty of free points.
Now if there's any catch to how easy and cheap PermAds is it's the prominence of where your ad is displayed. Currently, your ad is displayed exclusively on their partner site NovusSearch. So, the visibility of your ad depends on how much usage and traffic NovusSearch gets. This is going to be one of those chicken and egg things. Right now there's not a lot of search traffic to NovusSearch. But the upside of that is there aren't a lot of advertisers competing for your search phrases. But if this idea ever suddenly gets a lot of attention and traffic the advertisers will come running. Likewise if the advertisers start placing lots of ads, more people will come there to search. And believe me, a site like this can explode in popularity given the right circumstances. I've seen it happen before. Look up the Million Dollar Homepage if you don't believe me.
So, what's my overall recommendation? In spite of the low traffic NovusSearch gets currently, it's hard not to recommend signing up for a PermAds account as an alternative to traditional CPC and CPM advertising methods such as Google AdWords or ValueClick. Since an account and 5 PermAds Points are currently free it's almost definitely worth your investment of just a few minutes of your time. Plus, getting in early can make it easier to maintain your ad placement if the site's popularity explodes one day.
No comments:
Post a Comment