One of the best stories of the world wide web, IMHO, is the Napster rise and fall. That story shows you how the web empowered genius minds to send shock waves across the world and force some of the biggest corporations in the world to wet their pants.
When Amazon AWS experienced a serious issue in the US east coast region, one of the most common questions posted on their forum was “What is going on?”. We’ve all experienced that moment, usually with ISPs, mobile operators and other 24/7 stuff we’re fish out of the water without. And if you really try to think about it, the explanation for downtime is usually imprecise, vague and smelly PR-ish.
When the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft was announced, I checked some of the early posts from various sources that tried to research why did Skype manage to grow so much and became simple too big to ignore or avoid. Apart from the various “free, easy, cute” descriptions, the one that remained in my mind was “p2p”. At first I thought that was a typo. But then it made more sense than anything else.
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.