Free Advertising Possible With Adtopsy

If you are paying 3k for that display ad, you naturally want it to go a longer way, as with anything we spend money on – more value for the same price. With Adtopsy, a social ranking system for ads, “free advertising” is possible so that you can get more than your 3k worth of exposure.

Through a simple toolbar at the top of the screen, Adtopsy allows users to comment and rate ads and immediately view related tweets on the product. While Adtopsy is not yet up and running, I managed to find an example of their Social Ad Wrapper on a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 YouTube video.

Social Ad Wrapper example for a YouTube video on the Lamborghini Gallardo. Click to enlarge.

One main differentiator from the StumbleUpon toolbar is that it automatically shows you Twitter conversations regarding that particular ad and product. It also seems to interface with Facebook but that feature is inaccessible in this example I pulled. It’ll probably allow you to immediately share it with friends in Facebook, and perhaps even show all Facebook activity on the product or ad.

With more advertisers using Adtopsy to add more interactivity to ads, Adtopsy will accumulate a lot of precious data on how users on the ground interact with ads and their preferences. One way in which Adtopsy intends to use this data and which highly benefits advertisers, is in the form of the “Top Ads Chart”. This Chart will show the top ads as determined by the amount of positive user interaction. This thus gives even more publicity to the ads, further incentivizing advertisers to make their ads more appealing to users.

For advertisers, this is where the potential of free advertising comes in. If their ad attracts enough users to rate it positively, it has a chance of getting featured not just on the original site in which it was displayed but also on the Adtopsy Top Ads Chart itself.

Interacting using the Social Ad Wrapper. Click to enlarge.

What’s unclear now is how the Social Ad Wrapper will look and behave for multiple ads on the same page (each occupying a different piece of real estate). Currently, the Lamborghini Gallardo one is all I have to go on for now.

Using just this example of a Social Ad Wrapper, then from a user function point of view, the other differences between Adtopsy and StumbleUpon is the ability to comment on the ad within the same page for the former. Also, Adtopsy contains the user to interacting with said ad (there is no ‘stumbling’ to the next ad). StumbleUpon redirects you to the listing on StumbleUpon.com if you want to input a comment.

There are two great things about the StumbleUpon model vis-à-vis the Adtopsy model.

(1) The user behaviour inherent to the system is the stumbling upon related sites, aka channel surfing the web. StumbleUpon’s input of paid ads is great here. Whereas Adtopsy can’t immediately shove a related site/ad/product to the user.

(2) If the user wants to comment, (s)he is directed to the StumbleUpon’s listing of the site, allowing more opportunities for contextual ads to be placed on the site. For Adtopsy, a user has to manually go to the Top Ads Chart. There is currently no push factor from the Social Ad Wrapper to go to a site where Adtopsy can sell related advertisements.

Despite this, what’s clear is the enormous potential Adtopsy has in gathering actual user preferences with regards to ads with the Social Ad Wrapper. If Adtopsy builds up a destination site with enough traffic from people interested in browsing interesting ads (pull factor), they could do many kinds of contextual advertising. But more importantly, advertisers would want to buy user preference and interaction data across specific types of ads and products and use them to further improve their ads. Such partnership deals with advertisers could be extremely lucrative.

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