Advertising Chicken
There are usually two words to describe exactly the same thing. In the search world crawl is a positive word and scrape is a negative one and each describe the fetching of a page to index. You can be arrogant or confident. You can have a conflict of interest or have synergies. And so on.
Perhaps the newest is viral marketing. It’s good to be viral. It’s bad to have a pyramid scheme.
An interesting idea is mmmzr.com, a site that let’s you buy links and then if people after you buy links you get a refund and if two people buy ads after you then you double your initial outlay. Here’s the experience of one advertiser who bought in at $8.
I love it. Just as a social experiment in seeing where the fun stops as the stakes get higher. The site is almost like a game of advertising chicken. Even funnier is the story of the Japanese guy behind it.
Because of the structure of the payouts he effectively receives 25% of the top bids for the columns. So at the moment, he has made roughly $512. The site looks like it launched in the last few days, or maybe it was the Seth Godin post that got things started.
For those who thought the million dollar home page was a one off novel invention, think again: the currency of links and especially links from a page that has received a lot of publicity will always have value in a world ruled by Google. And publicity stunts will never go out of favor.
[…] I call it a game of advertising chicken and love the creativeness of the guy who created mmmzr.com. […]
[…] So its like paying for advertising, however the aim is also to get double your money back. In the mean time, you’ve received some prominent exposure. Early mmmzr customers have already reported sharp increases in traffic and the doubling of their investments. When I first tuned in, all 7 columns were going for $1024 - there had been 10 purchases per column already. The site attracted attention very quickly and plenty put their money on the table while it was still cheap. At about this stage, I made note that there would have to be a certain threshhold, not too many tiles into the future, where the going price would exceed the value of placement on the site and future investors would become increasingly wary of participating in a game of Advertising Chicken. […]
I played chicken on MMMZR twice & won both times. I gave it another go on http://www.pyrad.com & won, just debating if it’s worth going higher now it’s up to $32 - it certainly gets the blood pumping!