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From an Internet start-up offering advertising supported free e-mail, Hotmail signed up 12 million subscribers in its first 18 months. Its nearest competitor, Juno, spent 40 times more on marketing but attracted a paltry number of users in comparison. Hotmail succeeded by embedding a meme into every message sent, a single line at the bottom saying: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com", turning every Hotmail user into a rep for the product. Amazon.com’s affiliate programme is another success story. Affiliate users place links to Amazon in their pages, receiving a percentage of revenue for every sale that comes from linking through their sites. By letting you choose specific categories to advertise, even specific book titles, the site lets you tailor the advertising to the content of your own pages. People do not like advertising, but they do like things that are free or entertain them. The Internet is, in principle, both free and entertaining. It also has a structure that makes it easy for ideas to spread quickly. By "piggybacking" marketing messages onto messages people actually want, they become memes, multiplying invisibly and rapidly through the population. |
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