According to Brad King in his Marketing Shift article titled Microsoft Now Wooing America Online, the big boys of the Internet (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc) are concerned with only one thing: dominating the rapidly growing market of online advertising networks.  Google is "wiping the table with its competition [and] no company believes it has the technology at its disposal to change that," prompting yet another round of big-name buyouts.  I can understand the logic behind snatching up the shell of a former giant like AOL; the name recognition alone is worth something.  But what keeps me scratching my head is an absolute refusal to introduce something new.  

Instead of unloading hundreds of millions of dollars into nothing more than a domain name (seriously, what more does an AOL buyout offer?), why not invest a mere percentage of that into developing a solution to de-throne the status quo?  That's how Google joined the hallowed ranks of the devine, isn't it?  The simple answer is that large corporations lack the compulsions that we simple folk have in spades.  Whereas most Microsoft execs have likely secured their financial futures with gilded stock options and parachutes of gold, we still view our sunset years as a large and murky question mark and are compelled to find a way to change that.  And because we don't have a market within which we can sell a percentage of our identity disguised as equity shares, it is not so easy for us to buy a solution to our financial woes.

This does not suggest, however, that a publicly-traded corporation wouldn't immediately capitalize on an innovative and unique approach to online advertising were it to stumble across one.  And I suppose we have obscurity to thank for no one having stumbled across us yet.  The dark cloud of competing start-ups offers the silver lining of there being just too many good people doing great things online, decreasing the chances of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or IAC ripping us off.

Having said that, we are going to go ahead and tempt the fates and issue a couple of sneak peaks into our platform.  Development is on track, and we're beginning to execute plans for our second major round of development.  For those not involved with the private beta but eager to see what we've got up our sleeves, here are a few snippets to whet your appetite.

A basic view of one of our our homepage content browsers that users can sort by popularity, activity, age and more; default sort is by popularity:

Here's a snip from our content profile page, which fully cross-references individual ads with all other content in the database.  Site users are cross-referenced in a similar fashion:

A glimpse of our voting module interface, which lets users increase or decrease the visibility of posted content through a simple "yay" or "nay" vote, and by assigning a verdict to posted content:

And a look at the Featured Ad Campaign's homepage display.  Advertisers willing to pay for one week as the most visible ad on the site should consider the ramifications of the resulting consumer feedback.  Even in the face of stinging consumer criticism, the Featured Ad cannot be removed until seven days has elapsed:

As development continues to edge towards completion, we'll continue to reveal bits of our platform.  Questions?  Email us at brandjury@gmail.com.  

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