Flirtomatic launches its own AdWords style mobile advertising service Flirt-Words

Bena: Hello Flirtomatic. How would you best describe your new service?

Flirtomatic: “Adwords for the Flirtatious”

Bena: Yikes!

Flirtomatic has launched a new Flirt-word service. This service allows users the chance to buy the rights to a certain word for a 24 hour period.

What?
Basically, users can request to bid on a word such as “hot” or “cool”.

Then what happens?
Think of it like a sponsored link – when its searched for, the purchased word will appear at the top of the results of Flirtomatic. This will give the maximum visibility.

What about bidding?
So, some words are more popular than others and the cost or price of words is calculated based on demand. So the most sought after words get the highest price point.

From the press release:

Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic commented: “We know that users love to advertise themselves on the site and the Flirt-words service gives them a new and targeted way to get instant exposure. Think of it as Google Adwords for the flirtatious. I’m planning on buying Chelsea.”

Mark added: “It’s an extremely interesting experiment for us and as the majority of our users seem to realise the value of screen real-estate on mobile it seemed like a natural progression in profile search capability. It’s a simple concept over perhaps a bidding system, but let’s see what our users think of it!”

What we think?
An automatic banner creation offer is also tied into this service. This means that users can convert the words they purchase into ads that say “I’m hot”, or something similar, and highlight their own details.

What we think? Part 2
This is a genius way of promoting Flirtomatic’s users and its own inventory. In short, this is a way of keeping in valued advertising traffic for Flirtomatic and encapsulating the Flirtomatic service as an eco-system and away from a community.

I mean, of course Flirtomatic is a mobile social community –but the ads are now a revenue stream and hence an eco-system for development and growth. This is relevant and vital, and it cuts out the middle men so more revenue goes back to Flirtomatic.

In my best Flirtomatic style language – “I find it hot baby, hot!”

More seriously - what about the ad-networks and in-application mobile ad providers?

Whilst this is brilliant for Flirtomatic, other ad-networks make their living feeding ads into mobile social networks. I remember MocoSpace at CTIA blowing Smaato’s trumpet and vice versa. In a recession social networks need to find the best monetisation potential. Going solo will be tough on the ad networks. But on top of that larger ad networks should look at acquiring smaller social networks as this in-site ad inventory us can instantly fill mobile ad inventory driving traffic all around.