Doubledump
Doublerecall is a great idea. It solves a big issue for both publishers and advertisers in a sweet and easy way. Impression costs are falling, and impressions alone are not enough. The classic banner selling business is slowly being eaten away by action based advertising where publishers get paid only if the visitor triggers an action on the advertisers site. It is normal and expected that both of them will be searching for new ways to a) raise advertising revenues and b) lower advertising costs. Hm. Google spoiled advertisers. They are now used to pay per click, and publishers don’t like that.
The less than 1% conversions from impressions to clicks is actually normal. Classic advertising (tv, radio, newspapers, billboards) works in the same way. Spam everyone everywhere and hope 0.1% of the targeted people will react. Even 0.01% will do. Even email spam works the same way. And they try to sell banners in the same way.
The Doublerecall team came up with an idea to provide content publishers with a simple way to earn revenues by selling content. We’ll, they are not actually selling content, but the bottom line is that. You access a page with content, that page shows you a form and a image-text with some advertising space. You, the user, are then required to type two marked words in that text in order to access the content you wanted. The content remains free for the end user, but now it brings in cash from advertisers that are subject to an brand-aware user. Fantastic idea, simple realization, great opportunities.
But there is one problem.
Content on the web is free. Content on the web is accessed without restrictions, calls-to-action (enter your email to access content? that did not work) or other methods that require users to do something in order to consume the content. Those “rules” work for general content and mostly for specialized one. Yes, I just wrote that Murdock’s plan on selling access to content will may not work in the end. Just as classic music selling is gone for good.
Doublerecall is a very negative user experience and because of the basic principles of the web, it should not work, ever. The idea is great, just as creating a nuclear weapon required a genius. But nothing good will come from it.