Sunday, December 8, 2013

Pricing sneezes

Seth Godin has a concept of sneezers that I first encountered in his Unleashing the Ideavirus. Sneezers pass on ideaviruses to those around them and come in two types, powerful and frequent. The two types are inversely related. Frequent sneezers are always going on about one or another idea so much that they become background noise, losing their power. They lose their power even more when they sell their sneezing. Powerful sneezers only sneeze ideaviruses they actually endorse and they do not do so lightly. The value of their endorsement is high but it is very hard to get unless you have a compelling ideavirus that they actually like. Their endorsements have power because they are genuine.

CoinURL is a bitcoin service that monetizes your content by inserting interstitial links between your recommendation of a link and the content you're sending people to. You get paid for every time somebody clicks on one of your text links and a coinurl ad gets shown. The pay rate is their guess of how much an anonymous sneezer they don't know should be recompensed for converting his sneezes from powerful to frequent.

Whether I ever use their service or not (and the CoinURL link above is a referral link, perhaps the only one of their links I'll ever use), I can look at their prices and indirectly intuit information about the price of influence and that makes CoinURL interesting.

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