Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The plan is that contributors will be paid for their articles (but not profiles) in the form of Google AdSense impressions. These ads will come from Tinfinger's general inventory and will not be associated with the contributor's own pages, thus making it unlikely they will be tempted into click fraud.
Each contributor will need to register as a publisher with Google, and provide their publisher ID to Tinfinger. Any resulting fees will be paid directly to the contributor by Google.
The nominal rate for articles will be 10,000 impressions. How much revenue that will deliver remains to be seen, but Tinfinger's target CPM of $US1 would yield $US10.
Montgomery said "We're expecting to get a lot more banner advertising that is site-targeted [than run of the mill text ads]," as the large number of categories on the site present plenty of opportunities for targeted ads. To that end, Tinfinger is working with an AdSense optimisation team. Furthermore, banners typically pay between five and 30 times as much as text ads, he added.
The actual number of impressions paid for articles will be adjusted downwards in proportion to their quality, originality and the notability and popularity of the subjects. Conversely, Tinfinger may offer bounties to attract articles on particular types of people.
This arrangement means that the company will carry a significant impression debt for some time, and it will almost certainly take months to work it off. It's "a bunch of IOUs, basically", said Montgomery. Since contributors have an interest in the site succeeding, they are likely to act as evangelists, he added.
Tinfinger won't be completely starved of revenue at the outset, as ads appearing on index, news and profile pages will be on its own account - contributors' ads will appear on the other user-contributed pages. When the impression debt is cleared, the company's revenue should increase as it gets a bigger share of the ads appearing on the site.
It's an unusual way of doing business, but it means Montgomery and co-founder Tai Tran have been able to avoid the need for outside investment. Tinfinger has been funded from the duo's FanFooty fantasy Aussie Rules operation.
"We've been at this for over two years, so I thought it was time we launched," said Montgomery. "We've taken the time to refine the software" so it has the features needed to attract people that aren't on the bleeding edge of technology, he added.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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