The internet bubble really started to swell back in the days when companies started to realize that they could monetize impressions.  A thousand page views and later impressions would generate a metric that advertisers could value and they would pay for that value.  This was an extrapolation similar to sending a person out to the interestate to count the number of cars that drive by a billboard ad, and then valuing the advertising signal that might be achieved for that location.

Internet advertisers rapidly found many different ways to push ads around the internet from pop ups to banner ads to drop downs and hover text.  Then Google launched Paid Per Click contextual advertising.  A google bot would read the content on a page and match the context of that content to an advertisers ad and put that ad via a little script box on the same page.  So if a person is reading an article about a Dell PC or a Vlassic Dill Pickle they will see an ad for a Dell PC or a Vlassic Dill Pickle respectively, and the two will not generally cross.  This means that if you are reading about a Dell, dude, you won’t get a pickle ad, and if you are reading about pickles, you won’t get a Dell ad.  (Now lemons might be a different issue . . .)

Podcasts are growing rapidly in cyberspace and this adds a dimension to the content.  Now content is not flat on a screen, but dynamic in a voice or a sound.  Many advertisers are working to drop sound adverts at the beginning, middle or end of these broadcasts like the banner ads of the past.  Many different firms are hoping to make this easy to do for the creative types.  One company, TalkShoe is even offering up a different version of the banner dropping model in a Podcast.  They are offering a model where people would be Paid To Talk. 

Under the Paid To Talk model a person would create a TalkCast (similar to a Podcast without the potential that Apple might litigate over the trademark for the word Pod, even though it might not be long before Apple tries to litigate over the trademark for the word Talk).  A TalkCast is basically like an internet talk shoe where a person records a conversation with someone else and Narrowcasts the show on the internet.  TalkCast then pays for every person that listens to the show.

Its probably not to futuristic for some advertising company to figure out a way to monetize thinking.  Before long we’ll have a business model where people are Paid to Think or Paid to Ponder, or Paid to Savor the Thought.  An entire industry could popl up around the concept of Lucrative Meditations.

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