Not Quite a Blog

I'm convinced that companies like Snap and Vibrant have found a clever way to make money off of people that either opt-in or opt-out of their in-text search/advertising.

Both of these companies make money off of in-text search or advertising where moving one's mouse cursor over a link results in a mini pop-up advertisement or search preview.

(The wikipedia entry for keyword advertising lists Kontera and LinkWorth as also doing this).

That is, these companies have figured out a way to make money off of providing pop-up advertisements or search windows that they serve when users mouseover their links. In order to opt-out, users have to accept a cookie from the search/advertising company. This means, the more websites that install and use the these services, the more frequently users will have their cookie read and the more complete of a profile the service can build about them as "opt-outers". If the user doesn't want to eat the cookie but would rather not see the pop-ups, they might get annoyed more often. (And there have been some reports of services like these setting cookies with short expiration dates, so the user only opt-outs for a short period of time before they have to reset the cookie.)

This is sort of a "user is damned if they do, damned if they don't" business model, which is interesting and clever. It just sucks when you're the one annoyed by the ads and privacy-conscious. (Apparently, Doubleclick... err Google DoubleClick... has been doing this for years.)

UPDATE [2007-05-23T09:57:48]: I received an encouraging email from Paul Angles of Snap.com:

Saw your post about Snap.com fiendishly making money off people who opt-out of Snap Shots. I assure you that this is absolutely untrue. Our objective is to enhance the value of links by providing additional functionality such as previews, summaries, stock charts and inline audio and video. Our monetization is based on active user involvement with our products, not by passively serving ads. We actively listen to all concerns about our products and systematically address the concerns to make our products better. That?s why we?re now featured on over 1,000,000 sites and blogs and show over 13,000,000 shots per day.