IntuVision's Homepage

These people make up 90% of the online population (sometimes even 99.9% depending on the site); either way they are a huge majority – the mass of the unknown. Companies obviously like to make money from their websites – simple – but have found it hard to do so with these “listeners” as they don’t participate and therefore you don’t know what they like or what they don’t, how they think etc etc…

These people can only be tracked via a click, that’s their only trail. So can you make money by simply knowing that a person was there? Well in the internet world you can – ok not directly, but you can use the information gathered from these people.

Take Amazon as an example: even if you just surf around Amazon, without logging in you leave a trail – cookies – and Amazon can find out what you liked. Yes they don’t know what age and gender you are for sure, but if you look for women’s’ clothes you are far more likely to be a woman or if you look for technology you are more likely to be a man. Therefore they can optimise their site according to people who don’t even participate.

Nasa has taken this one step further. Using the great unknown mass of people, they came up with the idea of click-workers. The idea behind it was simple – Nasa had recordings of the Mars surface and needed to find and classify meteorite craters. It would have taken a scientist many months of hard work to look at all the images and identify the craters and categorise them. So one clever scientist came up with an idea: to upload these images to the internet and then for the public to do the work for them. The theory was that it would take the public less time to complete the task, than one scientist. The unpaid workers were named click-workers and in the end they managed to find 271,211 craters and categorise 76,003 of them. Genius idea!

So there are ways to make money from lurkers/listeners, be it the Amazon way, or the more sophisticated Nasa way, the problem today is, that clicks alone are not enough anymore. Amazon can use the clicks as guidance, but today’s clients want their customers to be engaged and what to know more about specific groups. Clients want ever more information to tailor the advertising campaigns, but where is the limit? How much information is enough? Is the gathered information actually useful, is it being used at all?

Lurkers will always exist and I believe that they will always be the majority. I think clients have to understand that, but also agencies need to find a way to tell their clients that although most of the people on their websites will be lurkers, there is a way to categorise them/make money/make sense of them!

Lennard