TalkAhead Review: Sponsored Comments done the right way

in News by Yohay Elam — April 21, 2010 at 9:10 am | 5 comments

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TalkAhead is a young Israeli startup that provides a solution for companies that want a legitimate and transparent way to participate in an article’s comment section. In the review ahead, we show how it works, and what’s in this technology for both advertisers and publishers.

The founders of TalkAhead, Eitan Ron, Tal Goldberg, Eyal Halahmi and Philippe Lang, were already involved in a startup in the past. HumanClick, founded in 1999, were sold to Live Person in 2001. TalkAhead was founded in 2009.

Sponsored Comments

TalkAhead offers companies to buy a message  within the comments section. Depending on the publisher, the advertiser can include a link in the message. The message can contain commentary on the article, promote their brand, and also dispel misconceptions. Such messages can also generate leads – thus being a textual advertisement.

Apart from managing a crisis / responding to bad news / nasty comments, this area could be used to leverage a negative article about a competitor to offer the readers your own company.

The comments appear in an area that is reserved for such sponsored comments, usually with a different color and always mentioning that they are sponsored comments.

Here’s how it looks at an article on Jerusalem Post, an English-language news site:

The next major Israeli integration is with ynet - Israel’s No. 1 news site, with an extremely active comment section.

Addressing Astroturfing

Their new venture came after diagnosing the following phenomenons. The amount of reader comments increases rapidly. Some comments criticize specific companies, products or political parties. Other comments are made by PR companies or marketers, and are disguised as genuine comments – astroturfing.

Apart from addressing the issue of astroturfing, TalkAhead’s business model is also based on the growing budgets that companies allocate for social media marketing and publisher’s will to tap into these resources.

Behind the scenes

Installation is simple – just adding HTML code. For Wordpress users, there’s a plugin available. I ran into some bumps when installing it, but it eventually worked.

Publishers can customize this area: the location of the box, number of sponsored comments, moderation rules, link policy, cost (can be done with different pricing channels) and more options.

The model is a revenue share model between TalkAhead and the publisher. The advertiser can either pay for exposures – CPM, by clicks – CPC, or both. This depends on the publisher.

On the advertiser side, TalkAhead also offers customization options. The advertiser can receive email alerts for relevant articles he may want to comment on, write a message and set a budget for such a comment campaign.

In comparison to traditional contextual advertising, TalkAhead claims that this method is very effective – a click through rate (CTR) higher than 0.5%, high branding value, very high relevancy to the article and full revenue transparency.

Apart from direct sales to advertisers, TalkAhead is partnering with PR, SEO and social media firms. Additional models will open up more opportunities.

Conclusion

All in all, it seems that TalkAhead taps into a great resource: the comments area appears in the main content column for articles, and is mostly untapped. So, here’s another monetization opportunity for publishers at an area which gets high exposure, more than in the sidebar.

This will also legitimize the way that companies can comment, and make moderators’ work more easy – suspicious comments can be erased easily.

It will be interesting to see how the integration with ynet works out and how well this technology will spread on blogs and sites all over the world.

Read more about TalkAhead at The Wadi Index.

Tags: Eitan Ron Eyal Halahmi featured Jerusalem Post Philippe Lang revenue share sponsored comments Tal Goldberg talkahead ynet