Squidoo Book Picks

Most big web companies like Squidoo support themselves with ads. Google ads. Display ads. Google has taught the world that relevance is king: If you can algorithmically show a surfer a result or an ad that matches what he was looking for, bingo. It works. Likewise, selling big sponsorships works, when you have lots of pages (which we do) and a big sales team to go out and sell it (which we don't).

On the other hand, when a blog or a site or Fresh Air or The Daily Show or Woot.com picks just one product at a time and features it in a big way, sales skyrocket. Our entire site, as you know, is built around the idea of recommendation, though in practice it's the long tail of recommendation, or lots and lots of little recommendations. Empowering individuals to create dozens of recommendation pages and reach their specific, relevant groups of interested people. You, every individual lensmaster, should keep doing that as well as you have been.

This Book Picks experiment is our attempt at doing the same; it's taking that principle and trying it on a bigger scale.

So the Squidoo Book Picks pilot program is a test at running editorially selected Amazon book picks, featuring 1 book a day across the whole site. We'll be doing it for 9 days, 1 book each day, and generating a spotlight book box in the right hand "advertising / stats" sidebar of lenses. We're picking a range of books to test interest from surfers as well as the clickthrough rates and purchases on Amazon.

With nearly 23,000,000 page views a month across the site, this is the kind of sponsorship space advertisers would pay $50,000 or more for, hands down. But we want to try using it to promote some smart authors and fun books, first, and give the Squidoo community a shot at running some stuff here.

In other words: We're always looking for new ways to test revenue models and make the site self-sufficiently profitable for us and for you. This is just one of them. (And yes, just as with ads, 50% of the book revenue will go straight to the community's ad pool). And in 9 days we'll be a little smarter about how it worked.