On spray and pray

I might win an Audi A3 – nice!

Or so RockYou tells me along with its not annoying at all involuntary music as soon as I access the site. This has not put off investors who have just stumped up $35m according to TechCrunch. I suppose the ultimate plan is to throw a million widgets against the wall and see what sticks.

There’s a line in the Lacy book describing the dissonance between a line of intense young men working on sparkly glitterballs for 13 year olds to clutter up their facebook pages with. I’m sure they will be able to sell advertising in this stuff one day but I think it’s going to be a low value game.

Yahoo’s problem is that it is stuck with all the low value advertising while Google hoovers up all the big money by delivering better targeted ads. I’ve said before there should be less advertising but it should be more useful. Google succeeds because it manages this. Slide and Rockyou have not cracked it yet with Slide’s founder suggesting advertising may not be the way forward. I think it is possible for widgets to generate revenue direct from users but once you have given something away for free it is mighty hard to get users to pay for it. And VCs won’t pay forever.