Idea Architecture

I have recently installed the now famous Stumbleupon toolbar on my internet explorer, and man! is it addictive! All I have to do is indicate what my preferences are and voila! I can be directed to very interesting websites I never knew existed! This works very well when you have sometime to kill; you have finished reading all the updates on the regular sites you usually visit and don’t know what to find on the internet. (Ofcourse, Stumbleupon is not a substitute for going outdoors or reading a book, when one has time to kill; but it defenitely makes sense when its pouring cats and dogs, especially in Mumbai, where one dares not venture far from home, during the rainy season)  

Stumbleupon is a very powerful tool according to me. Google currently makes money by putting up contextual advertising on the website based on one’s search queries. The things one searches for on the net are varied and the reasons for the search are also different. And this is the main problem preventing Google from becoming the ‘BEST EVER’ advertising medium. Google knows what you are searching for, so they place ads for products/services/experiences which they think you might be interested in based on your search. But because most people who are searching may not be interested in purchasing this product/service/experience and only want to know somethings about it, the advertiser may not get ‘conversions’ while he does get visibility. But, as the marketing dollar on the internet is cheaper than other mediums, the ROI is the achievement of higher visibilty.  Over time, and if you use gmail, Google gets to know what kind of business you are in, based on the email conversations you have and are able to send you more targeted advertising. This vastly helps the advertisers; if you were to send an email to your friend about her new ipod asking her what price she bought it for, google will be able to put up advertisements of various ipod deals available on the internet.

This is typically an example of the depth of a person’s interest phenomenon. If you were to visit a search for ‘fountain pens’ on google, you might be able to see the Wikipedia link first, followed by other links to makers of fountain pens. Many people are typically using the search engine to ‘research’ the product. If so, they would visit the wikipedia entry on fountain pens and from there be led to other links. They might find out about the top brands and make a note of this and later purchase this from a stationery store in their city. By not visiting the sites of fountain pen sellers on the internet, the advertiser’s dollar spent on the google ad does not have a direct ROI. Sure, the brand of the advertiser may have been visible, but the internet is not the best medium to make one aware of the brand.

Imagine now, if Google actually knew your preferneces and an advertisement of the fountain pen were to come on a website where one is reading up on fountain pens. This I beleive would pique the interest of the surfer. If the person is internet savvy, this might be a better platform for realizing a purchase; if not, the surfer may go and buy the product from a brick and mortar store, but the marketing association which triggered the purchase could be linked to the above contextual ad. 

This is the exact functionality StumbleUpon can make use of. If Google can tie up with StumbleUpon and based on the inclination of the particular stumbler, whose preferneces have been identified gathered upon through analysis of the kind of sites he prefers to ‘StumbleUpon’, deliver contextual advertising on that site, it would be a great step forward towards targeted advertising. It’s Google Adsense, with an intermediary preference filter called StumbleUpon. The algorithm for Adsense depends on the content of the website – not the preference of the surfer visiting the website. The magic of targeted advertising would be phenomenal if the algorithm for Adsense actually captured the preferences of the surfer!

StumbleUpon’s current revenue model is selling its subsriber’s occasional stumbles to a website for a fee. If a website wants to ’StumbledUpon’ a certain times in a day, they have to pay StumbleUpon a fee and the website will deliver on this numbers. If the google tie up can be worked out, another revenue model could be on the number of users delivered to a particular website through the StumbleUpon toolbar. If the nuances of this can be worked out, it would defenitely be a move towards mass customized advertisements!