Two new sites have opened up in an effort to court advertisers to sponsor tags (the latter is down as of this writing).
Both, I am sorry to say, are indicative of the bit of froth that is filling the Web 2.0 space. They won’t fly because they don’t have the fervent user community that marketers covet. Yahoo, however, does and I think we’re going to see them make tagvertising an entirely new revenue line.
Those of you who have been around here for awhile know that I am bullish over the potential of advertising on tags – or what I call Tagvertising. I believe this year it’s going to become a killer marketing vehicle. As Yahoo and others take tag sites more mainstream, advertisers will flock to sponsor certain tags because it is a highly targeted buy. It’s very similar in certain ways to Google Adwords.
The media players that stand to gain are Yahoo and Technorati. In the near future I bet we will see Yahoo start to slowly and carefully integrate their contextual search marketing ads right into their newly purchased fraternal tag twins – i.e. Flickr and del.icio.us. Don’t be surprised to see them stick contextual ads in these sites’ RSS feeds as well. And if the rumors are true that Technorati is selling out to Yahoo, then I think we’re looking at something extraordinary indeed with perhaps a revenue share for bloggers. Keep an eye on what Yahoo does with its latest buys and on Tagvertising overall.
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
