After nine years of its existence, one of the best user generated consumer review and feedback website, MouthShut.com, has opened itself for advertising. From now onwards, the company will directly sell the ad space on its site to advertisers and plans to earn a major part of its revenue through it.
Earlier, MouthShut.com earned revenue mainly from ads placed through Google AdSense and the subscription fees it received from companies for using its ‘Corporate blogs’ programme, which enables companies to interact with the consumers directly.
“We are eyeing to earn 50 per cent of our revenue from direct brand advertising, 20 per cent from Google AdSense ads, while the rest of the revenue is expected from corporate blogs on our site,” Faisal Farooqui, founder and chief executive officer, MouthShut.com.
Farooqui believes that it is the right time to open the site for advertisers as MouthShut.com has established itself as a trusted and neutral platform which is not influenced by any brand.
MouthShut.com will target advertisers across automobile, consumer electronics, mobile handset manufacturer and banking sectors. Farooqui claims that the site has already roped in advertisers such as LG, Window Mobile, Intel, Nokia, STAR One and Kingfisher Airlines.
The site will offer various advertising options such as content sponsorship, floating banner, pop-under, page-tear and video ads on the basis of cost per thousand impressions or fixed rate.
Advertisers will be enabled to target MouthShut users based on their location, time and context. The site has more than 3.2 million registered users and receives more than 2 million unique users every month.
As a user review website, MouthShut.com publishes both negative and positive reviews for more than 250 product categories. Will advertisers place their ads near negative feedback or reviews? Farooqui believes that all major advertisers these days are aware that reviews are a part of the feedback process and do not hesitate to place their ads near negative reviews. He says, “We always tell advertisers to consider negative review as a positive feedback for the brand.”
RP Singh, director, business planning, Maxus Interaction believes that negative reviews will not hinder the chances of MouthShut.com or any other product review website to rope in advertisers.
Singh adds that instead of considering negative or positive reviews, advertisers will give more weight to factors such as active user base, time spent and user engagement that brands will derive from the user reviews website.
He says, “We always recommend such platforms to our clients because user review websites feature amongst the top when it comes to active users, user engagement and time spent.”
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