We've made the decision to turn off the Others Online toolbar, and no longer offer it to consumer/individual users. We've already begun de-listing the toolbar from a few download sources, will notify current users via email, and then pull the plug.
It wasn't a very difficult decision actually. The core of Others Online has always been affinity profiling, and the toolbar was an experiment to see if a consumer product connecting people by their affinity would get enough usage to (a) seed our initial affinity profiling algorithms with lots of good data, and (b) develop into a successful business model. The former very much happened while the latter never did. And we never intended to spend a lot of time/money to "push" toolbar distribution, only to see if we could create "pull" (meaning lots and lots of people download it via word-of-mouth rather than our marketing).
Given the current state of the economy, we knew we had to get that "eye of the tiger", be fleet of foot, and cut unnecessary costs. The toolbar services were a dog -- we didn't have enough users or earn enough toolbar-only revenue to justify the toolbar-only costs. And at the same time, we're seeing great early results offering our Affinity Profiling Platform directly to medium/large publishers and networks.
The given picture really looking very funny. That's it.
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Harry
Wide Circles
Posted by: Harry | November 06, 2008 at 03:14 AM