All quiet on the Adimade front..

So you may have noticed that things have been a little quiet on the Adimade front for a while now. Well let me explain...

After running a couple of test projects (the my planet ads & Anything-aide projects) we certainly learnt a lot about the do’s and don’ts of running UGA campaigns. It was quite an eye opening experience and we were very impressed with the variety and number entries we got having done very little in the way of marketing the new site. The learning curve was indeed steep and whilst running it took up a fair amount of our time, it really didn’t cost us that much to get the site up and running and then fund a couple of our own test projects.

Alas, after speaking to a few companies and really looking closely at the value proposition we decided that we would put Adimade on hold for a while to work on a couple of other projects that had come up. 12 months down the track we are now working on other ideas and not really thinking much about Adimade.

A friend that I hadn’t seen in a while asked me the other day how Adimade was going. I explained that for the business to really push forward it would take a lot more money and time than Nat or I had to put into it. He said “well that’s fair enough, it was worth a shot” and indeed it was. Developing, building and running Adimade (even for the short amount of time that we did) was a pretty valuable experience even if it wasn’t a very profitable one. Were we to go to a market research company and ask them to conduct a study on how many people would create content for it, how businesses would react to the idea, etc it would no doubt have cost up the same if not more. This, in my view, is the great thing about the web. For a few grand we were able to build a site, test a concept and learn a hell of a lot about how it would work. For me this worth far more than the money we spent and far more than any course we could have taken in “how to create a web 2.0 business”.

So whats the future for the site? Well for now we will leave it up there, if people want to stumble across it then the content will still be available. As far as the future for UGA goes, I can see a great deal of promise despite the fact that we are walking away from it to a certain extent. Every week I seem to see a new product launch with a website with some kind of UGC element. The model that seems to be taking hold is individual product sites rather than the a single entity like Adimade but that’s ok, as long as there is an opportunity for average people to show they can make great content and get paid for it I’m happy.

So for everyone who has contributed, thank you kindly and hopefully we will be back with a brand new hair brained scheme in the not too distant future 