Re: On Epiphany marketing, and income opportunities

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2009/7/20 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.

That's an assumption that we cannot make until we actually approach
them. There could be agreements on a certain amount of money per
search, which won't necessarily makes the fact that currently epi has
a very small audience such an important point.



> 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).

For this to work distros don't have to offer Epi by default. And
regarding the defaults, it's not like we don't have friends in the
respective distros and solve the problem.

> 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.

Yay! That's the spirit! As I said, it could be done on a "per search"
basis, if we don't even try talking with them, we won't know what can
we get out of it.

We can market this as "as part to the move to webkit, we are planning
to revamp the usage of Epiphany among the community of users and
extend its integration to the desktop to enhance the user experience,
we think this would boost the usage of the browser... blah blah",
which is actually true.

On the other hand, as soon as you mention you're talking with other
providers, they'll probably be more willing to get to an agreement.
Besides, it's not like google or yahoo are not keen on donating money
to open source foundations.

So, if your suggestion is to just do nothing, and not approach anyone.
Then, okay, I got it. But I'm not planning to stop on doing it anyway
:-)

-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz