A new way to monetize the web

Studying Viglink, founded in 2009 to monetize links on blogs and forums. As easy to use as AdSense; just install some javascript on your blog or forum template and forget about it. Every time your audience members click links to any of the thousands of sites affiliated with VigLink, VigLink enhances that click with the appropriate code and if your audience has any propensity to buy, checks will start showing up :-).

Now that's pretty cool compared to the hassle for bloggers of joining multiple affiliate programs and attaching the appropriate code on each link (forget about teaching your forum's users), but it got even better last November as they rolled out the LinkWeaver feature, which automatically inserts up to five links per paragraph when it detects brands, merchants, or, in the near future, products.

As is clear from the type of people they're hiring, this new feature is an ideal playground for the implicit web. At 3.5BN page views per month they must have been collecting click-through rates on huge quantities of anchor text, as well as yields on pairs of anchor text and URLs. So version 1.0 may just insert the best-yielding URL for any anchor text it has seen before. Even then, considering [Apple iPhone 4S], should they link [Apple], [iPhone] and [4S] separately, or [Apple] and [iPhone 4s], or [Apple iPhone] and [4S], or save some of the five-link-budget for the Nokia and Sony references further on in the paragraph? Likely one of the reasons they stuck with brands and merchants for now. 

Even with just brands and merchants, context matters. So far they seem to address this by requiring a category at sign up; I chose "Books and Magazines". It was amusing to discover how often I refer to Amazon, even after I joined eBay, although a large portion of my references are to Amazon Web Services, not the store. On the other hand, the word "Ford" in an old post presumably wasn't linked to the automotive brand because I didn't classify my blog as "Automotive", but in a way that link would have been more appropriate than the "Amazon Store" links on "Amazon Web Services" references.

And that's just the static context. They're also considering Real Time Auctions which, beyond keywords, could eventually come with audience, social, and local data. This could well be the ultimate performance ad, immune to "ad fatigue" by its very innocuousness (other than a "Link added by VigLink" mouse over that appears after about a second they are indistinguishable from normal links), and with far more impressions than any other type of ad. That is, as long as people continue to read :-).