Well, well, well. There’s been very little movement over in Yuku-land over the past couple of weeks with the only apparent changes being some tinkering with user profiles and the replacement of “charisma” with simply postive/negative voting. Looks like there’s been a charisma bypass there…

So no important news about the much-heralded advertising revenue sharing - remember the DEMOfall presentation where Labatt bandied a figure of $3,000 to $5,000 per month being made to Yuku board owners - which appears to have been quietly dropped.

Now, advertising is the life-blood of companies offering free services to people. ezboard currently offers free boards that display adverts (with monies going to ezboard). They also have their Gold Community product where no ads are displayed but the board owners pay ezboard on the basis of ezboard’s claimed page views. And finally they offer individual users an ad-free experience in return for $12 a year which they call ezSupporter. This last product means that anyone buying ezSupporter doesn’t see ads on any ezboard and board owners of Gold Communities don’t get charged for ezSupporter page views either.

With the move over to Yuku, the ezSupporter was being dropped. This brought howls of anguish from ezboard’s customers especially as there was no gain in terms of any announcements about advertising revenue sharing either. ezboard users didn’t want to see ads and board owners saw that they’d be likely to be paying more due to the lack of ezSupporter page view credits (although it should be noted that ezboard still hasn’t released pricing for Yuku).

So imagine my surprise to find that ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt has made a U-turn in his latest WordPress blog entry:

“After a groundswell of questions and requests for ezSupporter to be continued in Yuku, we have decided to offer ezSupporter in Yuku.  I am not sure what we will call it, but it will deliver an ad free experience for those of you who want to subscribe to the Yuku version of ezSupporter.  I’ll give you more information on this as we figure things out over the coming weeks.”

Wow! That’s a significant change and I’m not sure how they’ll implement this in Yuku (unless it’s only in relation to users and not boards). But given the DEMOfall presentation, what will happen to advertising revenues? Well maybe Yuku/ezboard is discovering that potential advertising revenues won’t be as much as they’d hoped?

Interesting then for me to read a posting in another Yuku/ezboard-watch message board by a user this morning:

“No one seems to question the basic premise of sharing ad revenue. Has anyone put it to EZB to explain exactly how much volume will produce how much shared revenue? And who are the advertisers buying YUKU these days? EZB wasn’t worth diddly (flat out refused by some) to most advertisers when they had huge volume. YUKU needs to be pretty big if they’re going to sell any decent paying ads.

“I asked a buddy of mine who works for an ad agency where the money would be most likely found. He laughed in my face. I’m still trying to find out what the economics of internet advertising look like, but it’s pretty complex.

“The one thing I have found out is that YUKU is a joke to advertisers, most likely. MySpace has become toxic to most, and the “me too’s” out there are basically dismissed.

“My 2 cents.

“BE” 

Interesting times…