Here’s an idea I’d like to implement. I’m not sure yet if anyone will want to use it, but I think they might; the idea is a widget for reciprocal linking.
Picture it like a snippet of javascript that serves up a couple links, much like Adsense serves up ads. However, instead of serving a paid-for advertisement, it just shows a pair (or some other small tuple) of link to other sites. You don’t earn any money for showing these links, instead you simply have your site in the queue as well, and it will be listed on the other sites in the network. Essentially, you’re exchanging links, but with out the cumbersome need to make individual arrangements — and you could potentially link to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of other sites, without actually having a static list of a 100,000 links somewhere on your site.
Reciprocal links really means you’re providing a potential stream of traffic to others in exchange for receiving potential traffic yourself. The reason you want this traffic is immaterial; whether you want more people to view your ads, or whether you want to change the world and need more people to hear your ideas — all that is irrelevant to the system. All it does is serve links.
The system of serving links would be evenly distributed. Say, for example, the service was live and 100,000 sites had joined. Each puts a javascript snippet somewhere on their page which displays two links to member sites. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that the average number of page impressions per site is 1000/day. Some may be far higher, many will be far lower. Regardless, that would mean that the network of sites displays 200 million links per day, or that each member site would have 2,000 links a day showing, somewhere on the network. This is assuming that links change with each page impression, and that after each link has appeared once it returns to the end of the queue, waiting to appear again.
Basically, something like this would be free reciprocal advertising. If you run ads, the benefit could be more traffic ergo more revenue; if you don’t, more traffic ergo more people are seeing what you’re doing. Assuming that you’re writing or creating something cool that you want to share, that might be all you want.
I sort of like the idea. Low overhead, simple, no complicated ranking algorithms, win-win scenario for anyone who joins the network. It would be a moderately simple application to build, which means that anyone could replicate it without much trouble. But, so what? I’m going to try to have something like this built this winter, just to see how it will work, and to gauge interest.
If this sort of simple non-advertising advertising sounds intriguing to you, please leave a comment; thanks!
