Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Around a month ago I started playing with some community funding activities to see if I could continue funding TailRank simply from the good will of the community.

I have to admit that I was REALLY blown away how well this worked. So far we’ve made over $1600! Pretty impressive actually.

Unfortunately this is only a shadow of what’s required to run a startup. The VCs and Angels in the valley certainly have nothing to worry about.

I still think this idea has legs. If only we could pull it off! All that would be needed to build Startup 2.0 is a bunch of geeks and an active community. With Adsense it’s really possible to fund a good idea - all you need is traffic.

Then it dawned on me. Adsense!!! TailRank isn’t big enough to be profitable off ads just yet. It also looks like I’ll have to be bigger than I initially thought becuase my clickthrough rate is lower than I expected.

What if people could “donate” their traffic to a company (or Open Source project) they like so that they can use their Adsense revenues for funding? This would allow small teams with a good idea to work on their project full time!

If this works it could seriously lead to a significant amount of growth in the startup space. Instead of spending months tracking down VC, these small teams could focus simply on delighting consumers with cool products.

For most people their blog doesn’t yield a lot of money. Maybe $100 a month or so. Maybe less. But if you get 20 or so blogs together this is a significant amount of cash. Enough to support one or two founders to work on their technology full time. (For the record this is within the Adsense ToS)

Want to try it? It would be a super fun experiment! I promise to be as open about this as humanly possible. Unfortunately the Google Adsense ToS doesn’t allow people to talk about their numbers.

One key point. If this works, and this allows TailRank to get off the ground, I’ll donate double the amount of Adsense Angel we receive back to the EFF once we have significant revenues.

All you have to do is change the adsense code in your blog template to:

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–<br /> google_ad_client = “pub-7619656728989807″;<br /> google_ad_width = 728;<br /> google_ad_height = 15;<br /> google_ad_format = “728×15_0ads_al_s”;<br /> google_ad_channel =”9503847369″;<br /> google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;<br /> google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;<br /> google_color_link = “000000″;<br /> google_color_url = “666666″;<br /> google_color_text = “333333″;<br /> //–></script><br /> <script type=”text/javascript”<br /> src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”><br /> </script>

Update:

Adam Kalsey is already helping:

This time, Kevin is asking people to put his AdSense code on their sites. If enough people get on board, Kevin will have a steady stream of income to fund TailRank development.

Update 2:

Tara Hunt is running my adsense too! w00t!

Update 3:

Admin ID is also running my Adsense… w00t!