Press Release Summary: uTag, An Australian startup, has created the world’s first easy-to-use system for rewarding people who send their online audience to other sites.
Press Release Body: uTag, An Australian startup, has created the world’s first easy-to-use system for rewarding people who send their online audience to other sites.
For people who use social media like twitter and blogs there has been no ubiquitous and consistent way to be rewarded for their efforts in filtering and recommending content which is not their own.
That was, until uTag.
uTag (http://ut.ag) is an internet service that aims to reward people for the value they create for their online social networks.
Rather than being punished for providing links to external material that may be of interest to their readers, uTaggers can now, in one simple step, tag their outbound links and share in the rewards of having people click on them.
The service acknowledges the increasing importance of filtering of content, as opposed to the traditional importance placed on rewarding the providers of content.
One of the team’s founders, Nick Holmes a Court explains this further. “If you have worked hard to build a following online and have taken the time to filter the noise for your readers, why shouldn’t you be rewarded?”
“There’s already too much content on the internet. Content is not king. Context is. That’s who we’re trying to reward – the context providers” added founder David Vandenberg.
The system works by inserting a small banner ad above the content that is being linked to. The full content of the linked-to site is still shown and the ad can be closed, leaving the site as it would originally have been presented. The uTag team considered this closing of ads to be a critical component of the service:
“Our aim to reward those people who have gone to the effort of filtering information for their followers in a respectful way. That includes ensuring we don’t inconvenience the people visiting linked-to sites,” said co-founder Hugo Sharp
A similar example to the service is Google Image Search, which displays an image above the website it comes from.
The uTag team believes there is massive potential for the service.
“On micro-blogging site Twitter, there are already 2 Billion abbreviated links clicked on per month. In addition to this there are over 110 Million blogs on the Internet that finally have a way to be rewarded for driving traffic across sites.” Said co-founder Kim Heras.
It’s only early days for the service but already feedback has been excellent.
Another of the 5 founders, Matt Fisher highlights the results of preliminary market research:
“We sent some information to a few key people in the areas we’re targeting to get their feedback and one word was consistently heard…”finally!” ¬¬ This could be a pivotal moment for the web, where for the first time the very nature of the Internet – linked content – is the basis of how people are rewarded.
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