What's the point??

Merlin and I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately ... What's the point of all these pixel advertising sites? I mean - they're not pretty ... although, there is a bit of excitement around them. They're not targeted ... but there's tons of traffic coming to them. And they're not expensive - so, the ROI for an advertiser can be quite good.

But if they don't actually "DO ANYTHING" - then what's the point? Well, here's what we think they might be "doing":

Introducing people to websites that they never would have heard of before.

I've run across a site that sells an mp3 player / headset all-in-one (they call it 'cordless' - but really you just slip your memory into the headset and viola) ... then there was the site with the pictures of old boats -- I mean, what the heck is the point of that, right? Well, it had me lookin' at pictures for a full five or six minutes. Then there was pzizz -- a website that claims to be the "ultimate powernap solution". We even found a site that sells absinthe - the age-old alcohol that some of the Masters such as Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, and Toulouse-Lautrec have been known to embibe.

Seemingly a bunch of random shit, right?

Well, lets think about this for a second ... the pixel advertising sites are attracting "early adopters", right? (People that are into being the first kid on the block to know about something.) So, it stands to reason that some of these same early adopters (dare I say that they are the target market here?) ... some of the early adopters might stumble across the "next big thing" -- oh oh - that reminds me -- there was a site -- I dont' remember the name -- I remember clicking on "Even Monkeys Fall from Trees" - it was a DVD set being sold called "Book of Cool" or something like that - and it taught you all sorts of cool things like how to do basketball tricks, skateboard tricks, billiards, etc etc etc ... shows you all the cool tricks, teaches you how to do them .. pick what you want to learn about or just watch the tricks -- whatever you want. .. oh yes, there is it -- right under the Absinthe micro-ad.

Anyway - whew -- I digressed. The point here is -- one segment of what's working with the pixel advertising sites is that its accidentally targeted to early adopters across a multitude of subcultures - and therefore the requirement as an early adopter is to find cool new stuff. The sites with cool new stuff will find an audience within their respective subcultures ... early adopters and sneezers (as Seth Godin likes to call them) will pass the word to others about pzizz or book of cool on to the next wave of people and perhaps the little idea virus will spread.

Maybe PixelList.com should start a review site for the sites we discover through the pixel advertising sites instead of just the pixel advertising sites themselves ...

-- Harris