With over 8,000 blogs and content feeds generating millions of impressions, Pheedo is the largest ad network connecting your brand with today’s fastest growing and effective online medium.
— Pheedo
The truth is whatever you make of it or whatever boundaries you set for it in today’s Web 2.0 world and it seems those boundaries are either being stretched to great lengths or reduced to shrink the competition. Now making a claim that you are the largest ad network around is a pretty big claim. That means you are putting yourself ahead of Google’s Adsense and many other large networks. How can you even think it’s okay to make a claim like this without breaking the trust of your audience?
I have gotten into the same kind of debate with the founders of b5media who claim to have the largest blog network after merging with About Weblogs, even though their total number puts them below Weblogs, Inc. and the 9rules Network. Their argument is that 9rules and b5 are two different types of networks and therefore they fall under different categories. And even though they fall under the same category as WIN they believe that since most of the sites are inactive that they shouldn’t count. Is this fair?
As someone who is on the web daily and is smart enough to ignore these kinds of claims it doesn’t bother me from a personal perspective all that much. However, from a business perspective I can only imagine what would happen if a “normal” web reader comes across their network and see their claims as being the largest blog network around and therefore associates them with being the best. Same goes with Pheedo. Is this fair? Of course it isn’t, but when you are talking business competition nobody said that things had to be played fairly.
With so many metrics that can be used to measure the size of an ad/content network it’s hard for anybody to make the claim as being the largest or best, yet we still see a lot of people doing it. At 9rules, I know we have made a conscious effort not to say we are the #1 of anything, but we like to give off that impression in other ways. Trust me we would love to say:
- We are the largest blog network around
- We are the largest independent content network around
- We are the prettiest network around
- We are the greatest network around
But we don’t say these things (at least I am pretty sure we don’t) because where is the proof? Is it okay to set the metrics, rules and boundaries so that we are able to make all of the claims above or should we just worry about making the best product/service in our minds and let our users speak? We like to do the latter and I wish more companies would do the same. Just because you are the largest doesn’t mean I am going to signup with you, but it might mean that more investors wish to jump onboard the bandwagon so maybe I am still missing something there.
In the Web 2.0 world where does the truth end and the lies begin? Probably never since I am now going to claim that I run the most popular web design blog run by an “African-American” living in the city of Tampa with a messy room and 30″ Apple Display. The truth will always be what we make of it I suppose.
Do I think that companies shouldn’ even bother with making such claims? No, because we have to be proud of something, but I do think that we all should be more conscious of the claims we make because we all know that in today’s world where everyone owns a site these claims can quickly backfire on us.
Originally posted on November 21, 2005 @ 12:45 pm