Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Would you run ads from your competitor?

Author:Brian Carnell
Posted:11/17/1999; 10:41:36 AM
Topic:Would you run ads from your competitor?
Msg #:13153
Prev/Next:13152 / 13154

There's a Wired News article at:

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,32594,00.html

about a company that offers to run your ad on your competitor's web site (so if your GM, get your ad run on Ford's web site, etc.) They're able to do this because they're one of those "free" ISPs and they're framing the ads above the browser window (wasn't there a big controversy when WebTV did something like this?)

Anyway, I don't understand why people are so reticent about accepting advertising for competitors. I actually want to solicit ads from my competitors.

I read some of the traffic in the forums set up by the firm that handles the ads for some of my sites, and it's interesting how paranoid these folks are that an ad for even a vaguely similar business will pop up on their sites.

I look at it like this:

a) people who visit my sites are going to be aware of and probably see my competitor's ads anyways.

b) I might as well make money off those ads

c) if I'm that afraid that seeing an ad for my competitor will seriously impact me, I'd probably better get into a different line of work where I can meet my user's demands better than the next guy.

That is, BTW, one of the things I think is really cool about David Winer's efforts. Here's a guy selling Frontier, a content management solution, who helps set up a web log hosted on this site for a competing content management system, Zope (The Zope Newbies web log is what I'm referring to).

I think a lot of people in the traditional business would say that was crazy -- you don't even want your customers to know about alternatives much less help them with these alternatives.

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