| What everyone should keep in mind here is that, at its core, OnSwipe is trying to be an ad network. See http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/06/21/an-inside-look-at-ons.... Also see http://blog.onswipe.com/news/the-road-ahead, written by OnSwipe's founder: "Mary Meeker estimates that 50 billion dollars of traditional media spend needs to shift online. Our belief is that it’s in a holding pattern and can’t. There’s a disconnect between award winning beautiful ads found in print and tasteless spam ads that litter the web. We think touch enabled devices can let this change by providing advertising people actually enjoy with the best of the web layered on- mobile, local, social, and more. The touch enabled web can let us create ads publishers want alongside their content, advertisers get returns for, and most importantly, that users will enjoy." <Start sarcasm> Who wouldn't enjoy viewing award-winning print-like beautiful ads while browsing websites on the iPad ? </End Sarcasm> If you read the entire blog post above, it is quite obvious that the people behind OnSwipe don't really have a coherent understanding of publishing, advertising or digital, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that their product is an atrocity. The product itself is little more than a trojan horse that OnSwipe uses to insert itself between stupid publishers and users so that it can extract value from content it didn't create and didn't add value to. The good news is that this model inevitably fails and has since the late 1990s. There's no lock in for OnSwipe's partners, and once they realize that the ad revenue they were promised never materializes and their users hate the OnSwipe experience, they'll move on to the next company offering them a free bridge. |
But onswipe doesn't happen on its own - someone integrates it in to the website. None of those people understand publishing either? It very well may be the case, and I think onswipe's problematic, but I don't think "they don't understand publishing" is necessarily a good charge.