Orkut has launched a new feature called Orkut Promote. It has been developed to help brands and marketers use the viral potential that Orkut provides with its numbers to their advertisement’s advantage. Google had recently announced an exclusive focus on Orkut monetization in India and Brazil (their biggest and perhaps the only markets left).
What is Orkut Promote?
Many of you already know about how Digg, Stumble Upon function, especially the latter. Orkut Promote treats ads the same way as content on these sites. So basically, users get to promote or thrash an ad on the system, and suggest the same to their friends if they find it good or engaging enough. This way the more an ad gets shared the more people it can reach to and thus make the most of the site’s huge numbers (which now adds up almost to 13 million).
Orkut Promote will be another tab to your Orkut profile page and Google will use the tab to display promotions from both advertisers and other Orkut users (i.e., your friends). You can trash or re-promote sponsored promotions in the same way as your friends’ promotions. (Source)
The concept isn’t new. Digg had recently announced a similar model for ads on their site, taking cue from the way content functions on their website. And Stumble Upon always had this model, wherein depending on the categories that people chose SU would insert an ad in between the stumbles which users can like or dislike just like regular content. The more thumbs up that an ad got the less money advertisers had to spend on visibility. Orkut promote seemingly is using the same model.
In our last update on Orkut getting serious about advertising, we had blogged about how Orkut would offer custom solutions for large advertisers while smaller ads had to continue with Adwords. Now one can’t be sure if this new feature works alongside this announcement or is a separate feature in itself. In the sense, if Orkut promote is the custom ad solution for large advertisers that Orkut is looking at.
Google has never offered a customized solution and have always banked up on their game changing adwords system to run the company. Custom solutions don’t have scale at least enough scale for a company the size of Google. So for them this isn’t a new business model they would like to enter into. Therefore, to my mind with Orkut they have pretty much resigned to the fact that there is little scope for them to make any significant inroads in the SNS market. And instead of just letting it die a slow death they are looking at it as an experimentation lab for local markets like India and Brazil which hold strong potential otherwise.
