What the online advertising industry should learn from Youtube

One of the main reasons why Youtube is such a big success, is that this service allows you to embed movie clips in your own blog or website, just by simply copying and pasting a piece of code in your blogpost. Two of the major tenets of viral marketing is portability and shareability of viral agents. Youtube just does that. You can take the clip, post it over at your blog and share it with your friends.

Why don't we do the same with ads? Make them portable and shareable, allowing users to post the ads they like as content items in their blog... and at the same time rewarding them on a performance based scheme. That's not the same as Google Adsense, because in my proposal it's the blogger who decides which ads he/she endorses. Furthermore, the user will have to be very careful and picky on the ads he endorses, because when he exaggerates, or when the ads simply don't fit within the theme or tone-of-voice of the blog, the blogger's reputation will be at stake.

Hat tip: Tom Coates, pointing at this article.