Making money from the internet looks pretty easy.
You just have to sell stuff on eBay, or have ads on your site. Maybe just add a bit of pre-roll to your videos and add those textual advertisements on every other word of your blog. It’s easy.
And now, it’s apparently going to get even easier! Meet Chime.in, a social network that is promising to pay 50 percent of the revenue it earns from selling advertising on your profile page.
See? Easy! We’re all going to be fucking rich(er)!
Bill Gross, CEO of Ubermedia, which according to the Huffington Post owns “several popular social networking apps”, says that the start-up’s growth strategy is to “rely on the crowdsourced efforts of millions of people who are interested in driving traffic to our place”.
Oh, is that all then? Gross also told the HP that he's confident their grand plan is going to work because, “We're going to have great communities curated by really strong people and they'll be driving traffic to us. We won't have to [drive traffic] because they'll have an economic self-interest."
Key words: “going to”, “we won’t have to drive traffic”, “rely on millions of people”.
However, while it may sound a bit, for lack of a better phrase, like they're pissing in the wind - it would appear Chime.in already has a list of big brands on board who are going to set up branded pages, including Disney, E! Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Bravo TV.
Essentially, it appears that Chime.in have combined Twitter, Facebook and Quora and are giving its users the promise of shared revenue. The point appears to become a known expert or influencer in certain “interests”, as you can tag your “chimes” with up to five “interests”.
Gross is calling Chime.in an “interest network” as he says that the it's about “diving into interests" as people are “moving away from searching the web” and moving on to “connecting with people and they'll tell me what I need to know.”
So, basically, all you have to do is become known for telling people what they need to know about, say, fishing (or phishing) and you’ll have more people visiting your site, which means you’ll have more profile views, which means you’ll have more money, right?
See, you guys! Making money online is so easy! You just need to be an influencer on a website that relies on millions of other people visiting it, because it promises to give you money. Which will be easy because obviously everyone likes money. This is a no brainer! I think Bill Gross may have just fixed the entire economy. Somebody call Obama!
I get the sneaking suspicion this isn't going to work.
The Huffington Post made it clear that the site itself left plenty of things to be desired, as well as ample opportunity for spammers and scammers to go crazy. They also raised the point that while Chime.in may not change the social space online, it may force other networks like Twitter and Facebook to pay up.
We shall see, Chime.in, we shall see...
Image via aresauburn™'s Flickr