Monetizing Web 2.0

I was reading the latest book by my long time hero Jack Tout 'In Search of the obvious'. In his book, Jack referred to two Web 2.0 campaigns that are considered most successful: the ''Burger King Subservient Chicken'' and the ''Snakes on the plane''.


He argued that despite the success of these viral marketing campaigns (.e. # of hits), no-one at this point of time has been able to measure tangible sales results.


This recent article from Advertising age ''ROI May Be Measurable in Facebook MySpace After All'' might give us a glimmer of hope. MySpace teamed-up with Comscore (Internet analytics company) & Dunnhumby to create a single source database. That way they were able to take a close look at how Internet ads affect offline purchases.


The first study they did was for a personal-care brand which invested ~$1MM on MySpace. Interestingly the found that only 1% visited an advertiser page on MySpace and half who did ended-up visiting the personal care web site. However the campaign was able to generate an incremental $1.8MM in offline sales. More details in the Advertising age article.