LimeWire to split ad revenues with labels
p2pnet news | Advertising:- Limewire plans to split the revenue of its upcoming contextual advertising platform with record companies, CEO George Searle revealed at the P2P Media Summit in Los Angeles last week, says Janko Roettgers in P2P Blog.
But is, “something very nasty happening behind some tightly closed doors somewhere?” – wonders P2P researcher and developer Serguei Osokine (right).
Limewire has been working on integrating contextual text ads into its P2P client for a while now, Roettgers says, continuing >>>
Limewire’s 80 million users generate an estimated five billion search requests each month, putting the P2P client in the same league as search engine giants like Google and Yahoo.
In fact, Limewire would be the third biggest search destination in terms of unique users, ahead of Live.com and Ask.com, if it was a website.
But it isn’t and, “that’s why it hasn’t made any money from this search activity up until now,” says P2P Blog.
The advertising program will be run by a separate entity called Fanmedia whihc’ll sell CPC ads against keywords, “just like Google does with Adwords,”: says Roettgers, adding:
“Fanmedia will take a 20 percent cut of the total revenue per click and then pass on 40 percent to Limewire and 40 percent to the rights holder associated with the ad in question. So if someone buys an ad for a Ladytron ring tone (you know you’d want one) and pays a dollar per click for it, then Ladytrons’s label would get 40 cents for every click. ‘This is the first time that revenue would be shared with rights holders,’ Searle told me after his presentation.”
Is this an about-face? – asks Osokine, who has a special interest in large, fully decentralized p2p networks.
He goes on >>>
P2P companies were ready to pay any reasonable amount of money to anyone who would take this money from day one – for almost ten years now.
And they were always ready to use any reasonable business model to do it.
Their problem was not that they were too cheap to pay this money, but that the recording industry was too holier-than-thou to take it. Besides, the labels always wanted all kinds of restrictions that would (and did) effectively kill the P2P companies that were desperate enough to adopt these restrictions.
Filtering is a good example.
Osokine says he finds it sad that LimeWire has finally started serving ads after years of living without them.
Given its open source codebase, “I can’t see how it’s going to compete with its own clones if they make a slightest mistake and annoy their users even just a bit,” he says, adding:
“And mind you, I don’t have any insider knowledge whatsoever – I suspect that if I knew the full story behind this decision, I’d be even more sad than I am now.
“Such decisions are rarely made just for fun – there is likely something very nasty happening behind some tightly closed doors somewhere.”
Stay tuned.
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P2P Blog – Limewire wants to give record labels a cut of its ad revenue, May 13, 2008
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May 14th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Won’t matter. Someone will just make a clone of it and it will become the new standard and people will forget about the original limewire or limewire pro software.
Kinda like what has happened with emule….it is still going…. while the original client “edonkey 2000″ is long dead and gone.
It will be the same with this program. People don’t want intrusive ads of any kind. Period.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
“What?!? Only 40%?”
“Yeah? What’s with that? That’s not enough…”
“We demand 3.462*10^7 percents of ALL revenues from your application!”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
“Brilliant!”
May 14th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Reader’s Write May 14th, 2008 at 3:10 pm wrote
“Won’t matter. Someone will just make a clone of it and it will become the new standard and people will forget about the original limewire or limewire pro software.”
The “clone” is already there!
In fact even Jon here advertises for it on the left of your screen!
http://www.frostwire.com/?tracking=p2pnet
And what is the paid “pro”-version in Lime is actually the default open source free one in Frost if I remember correctly!
May 14th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
It might be a silly question, but why? it’s not as if they are going to stop suing users of the gnutella network, so why would limewire share revenue with the devil?
May 14th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Why would anyone use the advert ridden limewire when they can use frostwire which is free of those ailments. And if you are like me and prefer a high performance client on your linux box, try gtk-gnutella, or even mutella for the console zealots among you.
May 14th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
They call it illegal but at the same time want a share of the profits. Call me silly but isn’t that illegal profit?
Already they deceptively redirect users to their spam/scam sites through search results.
I’d go for the modified ad free version or don’t update it. Or else use a clone as stated.
Users don’t want ads. Thus they don’t patronize them. They don’t have money and that’s why they use the thing to start with. Hello! anybody home?
May 14th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Limewire Lite
May 14th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
FrostWire will always be there for you, same network, same as limewire pro, no filter, and yes… no ads.
May 14th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
If the music parasite start making money with limewire I will boycott limewire!
I want these parasites out of business, period!
May 15th, 2008 at 8:01 am
frostwire is way out of date from limewire: slower and spammier. it also has bundled spyware…