It seems to me, after a cursory look through, that by far the most popular type of web badge created and hosted at Word of Blog are political web badges. I did an informal counting of political badges under the “election2006″ keyword tag and found 311 different political campaigns are using Word of Blog.
What’s it worth to a political campaign to use Word of Blog?
$10, $100, $1,000, $10,000?
I would suggest that with a small bit of tweaking, Word of Blog could charge each political campaign $10,000 to manage its web badge program. The most important value add provided by Word of Blog would be the badge tracking service. Which URLs have pasted the badge on its website, who is looking at the badges, how many badges have been copied, etc. This service is not unlike what MyBlogLog provides its users. While MyBlogLog currently charges a nominal amount for this web analytics service, I suspect that as the metrics get better and the service provides private label functionality the price will also rise.
Thus, I think Ted Kennedy or Arnold (both use Word of Blog) and their campaigns would gladly pay $10,000 for that data. So let’s do the math 311 x $10,000 = $3,110,000. Not bad for a year’s worth of work in one sector of web badges. Now think about what consumer brand name companies would pay.
Even if my numbers are off by a factor of 10 (say they pay $1,000 per campaign), that’s still $311,00. I would bet you a dinner at The Capital Grill in Boston that $311,00 is more than ALL the social shopping websites listed in my right-hand sidebar have generated in revenues combined since they were founded!! Any takers?
This is NOT a small industry.
