Breaking: Slideshare Launches Pay Per View Advertising Options In Beta

Slideshare.net one of the larger presentation and document sharing sites in the world which recieved funding in 2008 of 3 million $ from Venrock and a bunch of angel investors has now launched their monetization plan in beta stage. Slideshare is inviting advertisers (specifically businesses) to promote their presentations and documents on slideshare. One can view the promotion page here.

Slideshare will charge businesses 25 cents per view for the presentation and the documents. More information is given in the presentation embedded below:

Model is similar to google adwords

The ads for the promoted presentation and documents would be placed on the right hand side as shown in the screenshot below:

Besides for the providing sponsored ads the model also allows geo targetting your presentation to a specific set of audience. Slideshare has been making quick strides lately as they launched their mobile site as well recently and late last year they were one of the first apps to be integrated on the Linkedin app platform.

Slideshare has been one of my favourite startups and it does have an Indian connection and an Indian office as well. One of the co-founders of slideshare is Amit Ranjan (who is also a blogger at Webyantra). I spoke to Amit about this monetization model and he stated that it was too early to talk about it as it was still in beta.

What’s our take on the monetization?

We felt that overall the model was good but the pricing per view seemed a bit steep atleast from an Indian perspective. 25 cents means that for 10000 views one would end up shelling out 2500$ which amounts to 1.25 lakh indian rupees. Now the impact of 10000 views may be different for different products and pay per view may not be the best metric to just impact of advertising. So i guess its difficult to say at this stage is whether this would actually work. I expect slower uptake of this advertising model as its low on ROI and high on branding. But over time this could be a workable business model i.e. assuming slideshare isn’t in a hurry to scale revenues quickly and have enough funds in the bank to wait for this model to be accepted by advertisers.