This Ad Stinks: Let Readers Vote

Online marketers are finding that rating of their campaigns by social networks can yield big rewards—or humiliation

by Catherine Holahan

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For Billy Bloom, advertising with StumbleUpon was a bit like stepping into the Coliseum in ancient Rome: If StumbleUpon users liked Zunafish.com—Bloom's site for trading CDs, DVDs, video games, and books—they could endorse it by clicking a "thumbs up" icon. A few thousand of those might make Zunafish.com a hit as word spread among StumbleUpon users and, perhaps, their friends.

But the crowd could just as easily render the opposite pollice verso, clicking "thumbs down." While Bloom wouldn't suffer the fate of a defeated Roman gladiator, slain then and there by his opponent, he'd endure the cruel punishment of having to pay for this negative publicity. For every Web surfer directed to Zunafish by StumbleUpon, Bloom would pay a nickel regardless of which direction the thumb pointed. "Obviously we didn't know how users would respond," says Bloom. "But we thought that they would like it."

Bloom isn't alone in subjecting himself to the unpredictable wisdom of the crowd. A growing number of marketers are taking their chances with having their ads rated, and possibly banished, on social networks and community-oriented Web services that have grown popular by inviting users to rate what they see. Almost exactly a year after eBay (EBAY) acquired StumbleUpon, whose browser toolbar recommends sites to visit based on user ratings, ad revenue has more than quadrupled. Advertisers can pay to have their sites sprinkled among the recommended links, but if the sponsored "recommendations" start getting panned, they're yanked from the rotation.

StumbleUpon isn't the only social site that lets users weigh in on ads. News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace allows users to comment on a brand's Web pages within the social network, and Google's (GOOG) YouTube users can rate commercials on a five-star scale.

Hoping to Go Viral

For marketers, the obvious allure of social Web sites is that a community endorsement might propel an ad or brand to fame and fortune for a fraction of the cost of a TV commercial (BusinessWeek.com, 7/23/06). After all, advertisers don't have to pay when users decide on their own to e-mail a link to an online video ad they enjoyed or post it on their blogs or Facebook walls. With social networks and services growing more popular, the potential jackpot has more advertisers asking users to judge them. The possibility that an ad will "go viral," the term used to describe Web surfers passing content among friends, is one reason why marketers are expected to spend $1.4 billion on social-network marketing this year.

Yet advertisers who actively seek the benefits of community approval risk public rejection and ridicule. In some instances, a bad review can mean more than a public-relations headache. Social Web networks could stop displaying the ad altogether. StumbleUpon, for example, applies the same meritocracy to sponsored links' ads as it does to recommended Web sites (BusinessWeek.com, 10/23/07). "This is not traditional advertising the way people think about it," says Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon's co-founder and chief architect. "We call it socially endorsed advertising. …You get feedback."

For Bloom, feedback turned out to be a good thing. After thousands of positive reviews, his site caught the attention of Time magazine (TWX), The New York Times (1 2 Next Page

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