Operation Bob

The latest marketing angle to leverage online advertising is a crop of sites that pay you to socialize - post in a forum, use a social networking site, etc.

As they explain it, they are making money from the ads that display on all those pages and, as a member, they share that ad revenue with you. When you’re looking at your friend’s profile, there are ads on that page which the site is being paid to display (or at least being paid when the ad is clicked.) Same goes for every page, and these folks figure being paid for using such a site will encourage a flood of members who will all be viewing pages an generating ad revenues.

Here’s a list of paid to socialize sites.

Will it work? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting concept. I’ve seen good and bad implementations of this strategy.

In the bigger picture, everybody and his brother is getting into the social networking business, paid or not, following the success of MySpace. I doubt many will survive, at least unless they figure out how to link cross-platform. But, that’s just my take.