Eefoof Splits Ad Revenue with Users

The pretty new and still pretty beta website eefoof.com promises to share advertising income with their users. The model sounds pretty simple: Post your media on eefoof and every pageview creates a share from the total monthly ad income on eefoof.

The idea is great and the service basically looks good at the first glance. A short test …

I went to the website eefoof.com and looked around a little bit. The design is clean but the performance is pretty slow. The offered media types are video, image, audio and flash. Eefoof also offers a forum (2.800 users, 50 topics, 439 posts at the moment of the test) and a developer blog (one article). The published content is the typical teenage stuff (number one link to a nice Japanese video ad with a girl in a bikini). Content theft issues and copyright issues are handled a) by the poster (claims to be author, does not claim to be author = no cash) and b) through community reporting (inappropriate, spam, duplicate). This seems to be a little naive but, well, the page is still beta and somehow it will be refreshing to see the development in the future 🙂

Advertising at the moment is presented by Google and AdBrite. Google is absolutely not the best choice as the pages have no text to offer from which fitting contextual ads could be generated. As not even the little bit of text in the media title, keywords and description is present in the page title or in meta tags you can not expect to see relevant ads. Sorry to say this but using Google contextual ads is really lame!

OK, I registered, received my PW by mail and logged in. The first thing I did was to upload my latest beautiful night shot of the lake Outer Alster in Hamburg through a web form. You can only upload one picture at once and metadata information like EXIF, IPTC or XMP is not imported at all. Instead you have to type in everything (title, keywords, description) manually. Technically this is pretty bad because PHP supports the metadata formats EXIF and IPTC and it is much easier to use a specialized metadata editor instead of filling out a web form for every single JPEG. Even the simple web form is buggy because you can add a longer title then will actually be published. This means double work.

The imported picture looks good and the JPEG quality is well balanced. BTW: Flickr is very bad in balancing the JPEG compression! The same picture on Flickr has 75 KB (500 pixel version) while the image on eefoof only has 28 KB and is also much bigger (793 pixel).

The imported text is buggy because German special characters (ßüöä) are missing. Außenalster becomes Auenalster. This also means double work.

The picture is available only in two sizes: display size and full size. The alt and title tags are filled with standard text and not with picture relevant information.

What really makes me nervous is the missing media navigation. There is absolutely no user centric design at all! You can’t go to the next picture and you don’t have any kind of film strip preview. Not to mention interactive page navigation like “people who have seen this also looked at that”. At the moment you always have to go to the previous overview to get a chance to see the next picture. This really is a negative killer argument for a page which wants to generate income through pageviews. This is even worse then choosing contextual ads which can easily be changed later.

A last point regarding the promotion of eefoof: They don’t even have RSS feds which would be the absolutely easiest way to automatically promote new content.

The last two points lead to my personal scary conclusion that the eefoof guys have absolutely no clue about their site concept.

The basic idea is good. Do you know other services which offer such kind of ad revenue sharing?

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, eefoof, media, hosting, revenue, database, sharing

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