Monetizing social networks has been a traditional challenge for companies (Read: Why advertising in social networks does not work?) and Orkut has gone all the way to publish a blog post calling advertisers to advertise@ Orkut.
“Recently we decided to move the location of ads on your homepages to a more prominent position: the top right of the page. While we know this is a bit of a change from what you’re used to, we’ve found this to be the best way to strike a balance between making ads more visible and maintaining our focus on providing you with a great user experience.” – blog
Orkut Demographics
- 79% Male
- 53% Under the age of 25.
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While Orkut has shown a strong growth, social networks are all about intents and navigational elements of the site results in bad CTR numbers.
Orkut earlier did brand campaign for IPL and would be interesting to see what sort of advertisers and how many non-CPM advertisers would be interested in this.
Coming back to the question – why a blog post about advertising? It does speak of state of online advertising and the falling CPM rates.
What’s your take?
As you said “social networks are all about intents and navigational elements” and what orkut has done with moving ads above friends list is to make it more difficult for people using lower resolution monitors – many people in India do use them – to see who is currently online which is a big call to action on orkut.
Orkut has literally swapped your friends with ads. This could be a UX disaster.
Very true. I guess they seem to be desperate..but then that’s the state of advertising industry