Squidoo is a website launched in October 2005. It is a platform designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Squidoo came out of beta testing in March 2006. Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlights one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning. Users who create lenses are called lensmasters. A lensmaster uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to Flickr photos, Google maps, blogs, eBay auctions, YouTube videos, and other links. Lensmasters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, expertise, causes, products, and opinions. Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the site are donating their royalties to any of 45 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo. Squidoo was founded by author, speaker, and notable blogger Seth Godin. On Godin's founding team was his book editor Megan Casey, Fast Company employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr.
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These pages, which he calls lenses, aim to highlight one person's view of a topic and hopefully distill the information into the perfect starting point for researching a given topic. An ideal lens will provide a searcher with the "big picture" on the subject, with annotated links to the most relevant sites on the topic -- similar to the guidance a trusted librarian would offer.
"We're beginning to see the backlash of one-size-fits-all search," Godin told ClickZ News. "There's a real desire to deliver something like what we're doing. Lenses as an idea will survive, whatever happens to Squidoo. This idea of boiling it down and giving people not everything, but just what they need, has a rightful place at the table when people search.
Squidoo will be set up as a co-op, meaning all the lens creators have the potential to share in the revenue generated by ads on their site. Lenses by default will include AdSense text ads, with proceeds going to charity. Lens creators who are in it for more than an ego boost can opt to keep the royalties for themselves, add affiliate links, or link to their own Web sites from the lens.
When Squidoo launches later this month, anyone will be able to create as many lenses as they like. Godin expects that Squidoo will lead enterprising users to take on the task of creating lenses as a full-time job. That's fine with Godin. He thinks it will result in the creation of more quality lenses.
"If a lens generates a couple bucks a day, and you build a hundred of them on a variety of topics, you could quit your day job. Hopefully, there will be a lot of people who'll do that, the way it happened on eBay," Godin said. "People can be in it for the fame, or in it for the money. Very few people will walk away from a growing audience."
A company can create its own lenses, or encourage its employees to do so. Again, Godin expects and encourages this, because it will lead to lenses created by knowledgeable and often passionate experts.
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Make money with Squidoo
Squidoo is an online platform of hand-built directories that anyone can create for free using a tool on the Squidoo site. The directories, also called lenses, resemble blogs, except each lens is devoted to a single topic.
Squidoo acts as an intermediary to search engines, giving people a "big picture" view on any given topic.
"Google is too good," Godin said, adding that a search engine might turn up millions of pages for a given search, potentially overwhelming people with information.
The Squidoo site allows so-called lensmasters to share their expertise on a given topic so others don't have to wade through piles of information.
The top 100 lenses visited on Squidoo include topics ranging from the power of raw food to ways for transforming your office cubicle into a gym. Martha Stewart even hosts a lens on making cookies.
Squid have large eyes, and each lens on Squidoo provides a view on the world, Godin said, explaining the origin of the company's name. It ends in "oo" since tech companies with two "o"s in their name -- Google, Yahoo!, Godin's own Yoyodyne -- have all been a success.
Web sites featuring online guides and solutions aren't anything new, consider About.com. But Squidoo rewards its lensmasters with a cut of the earnings received from ads and other revenue-generating links on the site.
All revenue is first applied towards the company's overhead costs. Then, 5 percent of all revenue is donated to charity. Once that requirement has been met, lensmasters start to share in the profits.
Half of the revenue generated from Google ads posted on each lens goes to Squidoo's top lensmasters, based on rank and traffic numbers. Lensmasters also pocket half of all other revenue, such as that generated from sales made via links to sites like Amazon.com or eBay.
Lensmasters might make around $1 or $2 a day from each lens they build, Godin estimated. They can also choose to donate their earnings to charity. But there's no guarantee people will be able to make enough to quit their day jobs, since earnings will depend on how popular their lenses are and how many directories they maintain.
(All revenue is being donated to charity while the site is in its Beta phase. Lensmasters will start receiving royalty payments once that's over, probably sometime before late spring, Godin said.)
At first glance, Squidoo's business model may seem a little unusual. It does, after all, call for giving away half of the company's earnings.
But Godin is no novice when it comes to spearheading new ideas. He founded Yoyodyne, the leading direct-marketing company on the Internet, and sold it to Yahoo! during the late 1990s dotcom boom.
Godin said he wants to build Squidoo into a self-sustaining profitable company. He also wants to raise $100 million for charity and make it possible for 100,000 people to eventually quit their job. That might be manageable since the company -- which only employs four people -- has fairly low costs.
"All we built was the platform. People are coming to build the pages," Godin said.
In the two months since the Beta version of Squidoo has been in operation, nearly 14,000 lenses have been created --10 times more than Godin had expected at this point.
Web platforms like Squidoo represent the new way of thinking about Web sites, Godin said. They're also models of efficiency and growth, he said, referring to the popularity of sites such as Flickr, which allows users to share photos, and del.icio.us, which lets people share their bookmarks.
"All these sites are growing because they're nothing but platforms for normal people to say what they think."
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