Re: On Epiphany marketing, and income opportunities

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

Hi Alberto,

I think I probably need to clarify something I said:

On 20/07/09 13:19, Alberto Ruiz wrote:

2009/7/20 Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>:
  

I think the basic problem with this plan is that GNOME has very little

branding control. Most of what gets deployed is re-branded in some way, and
the main GNOME desktops a. don't come with Epi and b. already have
customised, branded search. Firefox has _much_ stronger control over its
user experience.
    

Well, I don't think this is all about branding control. I was just
talking about promoting Epi among our own community. In any case this
problem is orthogonal to the proposal I'm making.
  

I don't think this issue is orthogonal, I think it's central. To get money for default search, advertisers/sponsors are going to be looking for basically one thing: audience(*). If they're paying for a default search slot, they're going to want to have a good idea of a. what type of people they will be reaching, and b. how many of them there will be.

If I understand you correctly, you want to go to search providers and say "We'd like you to sponsor our default search feature", and they will ask what they get in return. At the moment, distros don't offer Epi and they override the default search feature anyway (at least, Fedora and Ubuntu do). Unless some search provider is willing to spend that money basically altruistically, I don't know how it would be possible to give them any substantial amount of traffic.

Cheers,

Alex.

* - arguably Firefox wasn't sponsored because of their audience but for competition reasons, but it must make some sense on that basis also.