We've all been on sites with those highlighted words that lead toward advertisements and the like. Ontok Highlighter presents a similar system with a few twists. It's a highlighting system which upon mouseover shows a popup with search results on that specific topic as well as google, yahoo, amazon, ebay and other ads from your publishing accounts. Therefore when user x clicks on the popup ad you get paid - sometimes. The main catch in the whole ordeal, and the method by which Ontok will make its money, is that 20% of the time the ad presented is from Ontok.
There are a lot of great things about Ontok. First of all it is free and simple. It took me five min to get the code and throw it up on a previous post. Moreover, seems to work alright with blogger. There is no middle man, so you still get paid directly from the advertiser. The bad is simple: it’s still annoying. These popup ads are horrible when you are actually trying to read content. Furthermore, on my psudo-broadband connection the popups appear without any thing in them and take forever to load. The overriding factor in the whole expirence? It’s free.
Ontok really has a great model for business here. Forget content and advertisers, have others work for you to provide your income. I’m not sure what the click-through ratio is for such advertisements, but I’m sure Ontok wont be hurting. Perhaps instead of search results there should be a popup with a Wikipedia reference in addition to an ad.
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