Pantsland

Launched at Startup Camp Australia last weekend, uTag is a new service aimed at rewarding users for the value they pass onto their online social networks. At its core, it is a URL shortening service - the difference is that uTag place a banner ad frame on top of the redirected website, sharing revenue with the user that originally posted the link.

This sounds simple enough, but what do the members of these social networks think of being advertised to though the links they click? I asked my Twitter followers whether they would unfollow someone monetizing their links through the service, and these are a small selection of the responses I received:

Navarr: @bck: I would unfollow them if they became spam. If they were relevant, and had context, and just fit in, then its all good. And as long as it wasn’t just outright spam. Ads are the driving force of the internet. I recognize this.

rgillettpr: @bck they would need to continue with links the way they were, not increase the noise just to get $$ for it

lindsayevans: @bck probably wouldn’t unfollow, but wouldn’t click on their links any more either

rgillettpr: @bck if i started seeing way more links from that person, and if they didn’t seem like links that person would usually send, would unfollow

shauntrennery: @bck A good idea would be if Google have some type of API that would allow ut.ag to search for ads relative to the tweet. That could work.

The two main concerns overall were that the user continues their current trend of link posting, and that the ads were context sensitive. No one raised the issue of people making money off another’s work, and instead focused on rewarding the user that posted the link for their work in finding it. This is somewhat the same as how ‘guides’ on Mahalo and other link aggregation kind of sites get paid - they didn’t make the content, but they add value to it by indexing it and revealing it to others.

Personally? I don’t expect to get rewarded for linking to other people’s content, since I don’t see that posting a link in my stream is adding enough value to justify that. As such, I can’t see myself using the service, but at the same time I wouldn’t not click a link that is shortened with uTag just because it is using uTag. What it will do is reduce the chances of me ‘blind clicking’ to links without a description - at the moment, I’ll click through to a link that someone posts just out of curiosity, but I wouldn’t do this if it was a uTag link without adequate description. I do believe that in their current form, the ads are slightly too intrusive, but at least there is a close button on them (though it can get hidden depending on the size of your browser window).

Overall, this system is exactly how About.com does things, though in most cases they are adding far more commentary to the links than can be had in the limited space that most social networks allow. I see the use in uTag as a monetizing service for bloggers more than through social networks like Twitter and Facebook.