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Over on Capulet’s blog, I discussed Squidoo’s new SquidOffer, a new wrinkle in the online advertising world. From Seth Godin:

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don’t pay for the clicks.

I created a SquidOffer last week, and a landing page on Capulet’s site for it. I think I picked the wrong category–I should have put it in Business instead of Computers, Gadgets & Tech. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to edit your SquidOffer, or apply for re-categorization. Maybe I’ll drop them an email.

Additionally, it looks like Squidoo has pre-populated the program with a bunch of popular destinations like Digital Photography Review and Boing Boing. Either that, or they’ve been doing some killer ad sales.

In any case, it means that my little paid-for offer is competing with a bunch of powerful brands that have been apparently included to seed the program. It’s a kind of manufactured marketplace, and that’s not really on.

Regardless, if you’ve got 17 seconds, please go vote up my offer. That requires a Squidoo account, so your mileage may vary. It’s currently ranked about #14, so you’ll have to scroll down a bit.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. I emailed them a few hours ago, and they’ve already reduced (according to my theory) offerings down to zero votes. Thanks, Squidoo! This enables the paid-for offerings like mine to bubble to the top. That’s until somebody comes along and owns me.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under PR and Marketing. Tag Testing Project: advertising, sethgodin, squidoffer, squidoo, webmarketing. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.