MyLikes, a new company founded by two ex-Googlers has launched. It is attempting to rewrite the way products are advertised.
There is a general consensus among users of the internet that selling out, and by that we all mean being paid to do something in the social sphere, is a big no.
MyLikes wants to change that, by having you execute “sponsored likes” of goods or services from advertisers. Translations: recommend things for money. I can only speak for myself, I do not like this concept.
It smells of Izea, with its PayPerPost, only this is PayPerLike. MyLikes joins not just Izea in this field, but Ad.ly and others that are attempting to get you to tweet, blog, post, and share for money. They do not feel the same trust issues that we do.
But, it is ultimately up to you to decide whether a service takes off or not. Take a look at their own promotional copy, and make your own opinion. The below image is their concept of what a correct “sample sponsored post on a blog” should look like.
Would that make you annoyed if you saw it on TheNextWeb, or perhaps on your good friends personal blog? Is that the reason that he blogs his life? Would you put that on your own blog?
You can like things that are not sponsored, and you can like things for money and donate that cash automatically for charity. All three options are available to the users that MyLikes rates on a “influence score,” which will denote how much you get paid by the service. I signed up for testing purposes and MyLikes told me this:
I have roughly 5600 Twitter followers, which from what I can is more or less how these numbers were calculated. There are tens of thousands of people with that number of followers. The money is going to be tempting enough to get a large number of people to “like” things for cash.
I signed up and tested the service, and it works as follows. After you sign in with Twitter and get a rate, you are led to a page where you select a campaign to like. I picked Scalr, given that it has at least some overlap with what I do. Once you select a campaign you input some text, and pick a few images or videos to go along with the copy that you have written.
It then gives you a few options: post a widget to your blog to show off your likes, post to blogger, or embed on your personal blog. Oddly, you cannot tweet a sponsored link, at least as far as I could test. I took the embed code they offered, and this is what it looks like (please do not click on any links, they are active):
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So, there it is. A “liked” product by myself. Looks just like, well, PayPerPost. Anyone impressed? For those interested, the company is running a promotion wherein: “As part of our launch we are offering free advertising of up to $500 for the first 50 advertisers who sign up.”
As I said, it is up to you. Will we all soon be liking things for money?
Alex, MyLikes is an attempt to make this space legitimate. One big reason we took a year and build this system on top of a consumer platform was to ensure that users don’t like things for money but endorse products that they like
The other point that you make about MyLikes being like Payperpost is not right. We are about Pay-per-performance and incent people to like things that are relevant to their friends and audience and not just for cash
I disagree. I think they are getting close to the magic formula for average folks to leverage the time and effort they put into social media. Does Twitter or Facebook want or care if their users, who provide the content that gives their value, are able to monetize their honest efforts? Heck no. Mylikes is enabling a way to do so. Sure there will be dishonest people gaming the system, but the way Mylikes is set up, it discourages inauthenticity, because the more inauthentic you are, the less reputation you will have, and real people, who may be really interested in one of your likes, sponsored or otherwise, will cease to click, if not unfollow you.
This is the model Facebook and Twitter should be persuing, a way to reward their users, who are in fact their content providers.
I know this is an old article, but I wanted to weigh in on it, as I’ve been investigating a lot of viral advertising options lately for my blog.
I know that you look at it as a negative thing, but I feel that the fact is that advertising pays the bills, for a lot of people.
One of my favourite writers, Randy Cassingham of This Is True, recently had to shut down one of his websites. It was very popular, but it was also full of spammers and the cost of a spam-prevention measure would have been too prohibitive for a site that offered a free service. It did have some advertising, but it earned about $5 per month. This despite a top 100k rank in Alexa.
What sites like MyLikes or PayPerPost allow the writer to do is get their site sponsored. Just like professional sports players. Just like charities (you can, in fact, donate your earnings to charity in MyLikes). Just like politicians. Every website takes time and money to run, and sponsored posts are a way to offset that cost.
One is perfectly within their rights (and usually encouraged or made) to inform their readers that they ARE posting an advertisement… and one is also perfectly within their rights to write a bad review of the product in question, in the case of pure advertising like PayPerPost – and still get paid for it. The goal is to have enough advertisers out there that people can advertise things that they genuinely like and get something back for it. I recommend products, restaurants, books, movies… etc etc etc to my friends and family all the time. I recently wrote out a list for my father of parts for a custom-built computer, to provide an example. Considering that said computer will be worth about $3000 all together, I would love for the companies that I JUST ADVERTISED FOR by providing him that list to give me a little kick back. I’d like to get something back every time I convince one of my friends to buy something.
Why? Because I’m doing their work for them. I’m advertising for them. And collectively we are doing a far better job, for far cheaper, than paid advertising campaigns. In most industries more people purchase on word of mouth than all other sources of advertisements combined.
Don’t we deserve a little something for that?
Well, that’s my rant. Think of it what you will.
In my opinion, the idea is attractive and Don is right, advertising pays the bills, I even registered at MyLikes but I sincerely think that making money on your friends erodes your image on the web which is the real gold that pays even more bills in the long run. And just as an anecdote, I have this WOT add-on in my Firefox browser to check webs you should trust or not. The first advertiser’s page I hit, bang, big red warning sign on top of my screen. Of course this is not 100 percent accurate but MyLikes should keep an eye on that if they want the chain of trust to flow.
Interesting feedback on trust. We’re building a word of mouth platform called VIRURL. It promotes content and not ads or spam. I think what you’re spreading around the net is a large variable in maintaining trust. Would love to hear some of your thoughts on http://www.virurl.com … Best, Francisco
Bindu, I know what you are attempting to do, and I think that you will succeed. I disagree that this is progress, however.
In the end, I think that the money will speak the loudest. And that was mostly a semantic joke, anyway