Markets

Where's the Online Monetization Strategy for Balloon Boy?

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: October 16, 2009 / 2:15 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

All day long, I've been wrestling with the fact that BNET Media hasn't yet capitalized on the Balloon Boy phenomenon. (The entire Balloon Boy clan is pictured below.) In case you haven't noticed, BB is everywhere -- except, of course, in the balloon that gave him his new moniker in the first place. But there's one thing that hasn't happened in the media concerning Balloon Boy: to date, no one has bought the keyword on Google. Sooooobbbbb!

And this, even though Balloon Boy has:

Increased page views on Denver's 9News Web site from an average one million per day to 4.6 million.
Become the number three and seven trending topic on Twitter, depending on whether or not you use the trendy #balloonboy hashtag.
Responsible for hundreds of thousand of YouTube views.
Gotten sick on The Today Show.

And all in less than 24 hours! And that, in a strange way, is my point. There's an awful lot of talk in social media circles about real-time monetization. Though not all of those monetization ideas hinge on advertising, Balloon Boy does make it clear that the mechanisms aren't really in place to capitalize on real-time events. (Yes, I've riffed on this before).I admit that Balloon Boy isn't the best thing to hitch your dreams to; for one, there's the whole hoax thing. Then again, when was the last time decorum entered into making money? However, for all the talk about real-time monetization you'd think, that someone, somewhere, would already be using digital tools to exploit this, and Google's AdWords would be the first one to do it.

Instead, I'm betting that the biggest monetization scheme that comes out of this will be a very special re-airing of the "Wife Swap" episode in which Balloon Boy first appeared. That, and maybe a line of "Balloon Boy" t-shirts.

THIS JUST IN! As I was writing this post, the keyword "Balloon Boy" just gained its first advertiser. Let's hear it for AmazingAnimalBalloons.com!!