Ads For Tags Mister Wong Launches Wong SL

Social Bookmarking site Mister Wong – with more than 3 million unique monthly visitors one of Germany’s largest Web 2.0 services – is going to launch its own marketplace for ads soon.

Wong SL will let advertisers buy textual ads for tags for a monthly flat fee collected via PayPal. Ads are sold for the 3000 most popular tags used on the site and for each keyword only six spots are available. The price is based on the popularity of the tag – some will come at less than 10 Euro, popular keywords like foto might take you back 120 Euro.

This is a brilliant move for a variety of reasons. Until now Mister Wong used AdSense for monetising their property. They will continue to do so, but the tight and exclusive coupling of a business model with Google leaves you at the giant’s mercy, just think about the recent PageRank fiasco which affected many sites.

Obviously Google does a fantastic job at mapping advertisers with unstructured and free floating content, but Mister Wong already has solved the second part of this equation since the users are dynamically structuring the site themselves. Wong SL will not compete with Google in the long tail but will provide a complementary stream of revenue in the fat head of tags (i.e. less than 1% of all tags used on the site will be sold directly) which drives most traffic.

Advertisers can rest assured that their ads will be displayed in a highly targeted environment since the users use those keywords proactively on their own either for bookmarking sites they consider interesting or when searching or discovering new sites.

Last not least Wong SL even might shake up Germany’s ads-ecosystem for all sites which leverage user generated content and tags a bit since they plan to provide it as a platform for other sites too.

(via zweinull.cc / netzwertig, further reading at Handelskraft, both articles in German only)

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)