Influx

Paul Graham of early-stage VC Y Combinator has a nice list of ideas the company would like to fund. Included on his list are new ways of doing news, auctions, dating, simplified browsing, better photo and video sharing sites and advertising!

“Advertising
could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead
of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in
return for whatever free site they’re getting. It doesn’t work
anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud
they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated
to the web. The right answer will probably look very different.
It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So
the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from
scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to
do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably
the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only
later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects
are measurable, above all in sales.”

A nice challenge for anyone bold enough to take it on.

Posted by Ed Cotton