Any web business with an advertising or transaction monetization model is supremely interested in knowing one thing – “what do my users really want?” One can divine desire from search queries and from the context of a page the user is viewing. Companies have been doing both successfully, Google being the most prominent success story.
I’ve recently noticed a number of companies trying a new approach for mining user desire. They’re asking users to define their dreams outright. “Tell me what it is you most desire, and preferably how much you’d be willing to pay for it”, they’re saying, “and then I’ll try to sell it to you or otherwise capitalize on the transaction”.
Here are some examples:
Zillow
The famed real-estate valuation site launched a “Make Me Move” feature. Users can go up to the site, and post a valuation for their property which, if paid, would induce them to sell. Mind you – these are not users that are actively looking to sell their property. The price they are listing is their dream of the ideal transaction. And buyers are sometimes willing to pay these prices – take the experience of Jeffrey O’Brien as an example.
How Zillow monetizes: the feature drives more traffic to the site, and Zillow serves more ads, although the ads are not specific to the dream. In the future, Zillow may be able to monetize transactions.
43Things
The company’s frontpage is a searchbox that says “What do you want to do with your life?” People actually spend time building pages with a list of things they want to do. 43Things turns this into a community, grouping people who want to accomplish the same goals
How 43things monetizes: serving appropriate advertising that targets the dream, e.g. “Want to learn 3 languages – here are organizations that will teach you”.
QuietAgent
You are an employee that’s not necessarily looking to change jobs, but wouldn’t you change jobs in a heartbeat for your dream job? Tell QuietAgent a bit about yourself and what your dream job consists of, and QuietAgent will broker that information anonymously to recruiters.
How QuietAgent monetizes: via a transaction business model.
Why do I find this interesting?
For one, being able to distinguish between dreams and run-of-the-mill needs (I need to buy a book) is intriguing. Dream fulfillment is likely to have a higher value than simple desire fulfillment, no matter which way you monetize it.
Second, dreams are by definition something that is currently out of reach, so many people do not actively pursue their dreams. Thus, monetization of dream fulfillment may not be currently captured by search or other click-stream businesses.
Last, I am intrigued by the demographic aspect in Zillow’s case. We all know that 14-19 year olds live their lives publicly online, and are less concerned with privacy. This makes them early adopters of new products that require privacy to be compromised (social networking, anybody). But in Zillow’s case, I am assuming the home-owning demographic is not 14-19 years old. Yet, these older users are perfectly willing to post their dream online for the world to see. Does this mean the older segment is now more willing to participate in other privacy-breaching online activities? Anybody know the demographic for 43things users?
