Viral Marketing Idea

[stevenp]

Hi! I am considering creating a few humorous little Flash games. The ideas I have are similar to the "Penguin Baseball" and some of the other Flash "e-gags" that people pass along in emails. I would like to put an ad at the end of each linking to either an affiliate product or some ebook or software product of that I sell directly.

My questions are:

1. Since this would be untargeted traffic, what products would you try to sell them?

2. Is there any information on how widely distributed these types of "e-gags" are? Are the really popular ones distributed to hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions?

3. Does this sound like a good idea, or am I going about internet business all wrong? I know that I should "find my niche" and sell to people with similar interests. But one of my niches is creating Flash animation. The net is saturated with Flash tutorials and experts, so I don't think writing an ebook on the subject would be profitable.

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated

[Trifolic]

Most e-gags like that don't need to be promoted. Send them to 1 or 2 friends, they will get posted on forums, Then you have the "forum thiefs" That will take the post and post it on another forum as their own to pretend that they have a "cool find" It will eventually make it around to work centers and schools etc.. Not very hard to get those started as long as they are funny.

Problems that you may run into..People stealing it and posting it on their own site. People decompiling it and removing the ads in it. Finding advertisers willing to invest the money in the first place. The best kinds of products to promote would be untargetted things that anyone could have an interest in. You would have to play the numbers game like spammers do. Viagara, Diet stuff, junk like that would probably pay off well. Amazon products etc..

[stevenp]

Thanks for the feedback, Trifolic. I think the analogy to the
spammers "business model" is a good one. The spammers would not spam if it wasn't profitable. I probably would not want to advertise ******, but a healthy diet plan like Weight Watchers may work. I agree that I would have a hard time selling advertising. I think it would have to be affiliate links.

I would not mind if people put my egags on theirs sites as long as the ads remained in place. But are there any ways to keep people from decompiling the code? Or at least make it harder to do?