There was/is a lot of hype! and buzz in online community about monetizing strategies for FaceBook and Twitter. With all these, Orkut silently started showing adsense ads on Orkut, at some places. After some time it started showing ads on almost all the pages! But PPC ads doesn’t seem to be performing well on social networking sites, as people in such sites will be looking for friends and not for new products in the market, so they are less likely to click a ad. On the other hand, CPM ads may work better, as there will be a lot of impressions on each ad.
With latest improvements for advertisers, Orkut have moved the big 250 x 250 ad to the top right side and it has marked it clearly as “advertisement”. I am sure that it will improve the advertisers interest[Not sure about the users experience and satisfaction. Personally I don’t have any problem with ads, as long as we get value from the website].
Another significant, less observed and good ad placement is in the search result page of Orkut..Try to search for someone in Orkut, and on the top of the results you can see a 468 x 60[or slightly bigger] ad which is well blended with the theme(Orkut design).
And even smarter, Orkut shows “Recommendations by Google” and showcases and promotes some of its services.
Over all, critics are common when it comes to big players, but whats important is, we need to take the good aspects from them and need to learn from their mistakes. Everyone of us can’t make all the mistakes and then learn from it!
Over to readers. What do you feel about the ad placement and over all usability experience with Orkut.