Likaholix Becomes MyLikes So You Can Get Paid

In a pretty slick move, the social media site Likaholix leveraged their existing user base and database of user likes and morphed into MyLikes. The difference between the two? With MyLikes, you can turn your preferences and opinions into cash. Your Likes have the potential to become targeted PPC ads that are actually relevant to you and the people that follow you.

When we previously covered this service, it was simply a place where you could go and share the things you liked with others. They basically took what is arguably the coolest feature of FriendFeed (which Facebook and others subsequently “appropriated”) and built an entire application around it. Back then, I had this to say about the new service:

Likaholix is also useful as a place to find recommendations. You can easily tell what your friends like, which provides you with a trusted recommendation and possibly an entire discussion thread detailing why people like something. The next time you’re looking for feedback on a major purchase or you can’t figure out which brand of laptop you should buy, you might appreciate having access to a database full of stuff that people you like…like.

Now know as MyLikes, they have taken this idea a step further by allowing you to share your likes with others and get paid when people click your link. I won’t bother rehashing the arguments against sponsored tweets and/or posts. Suffice it to say that I don’t see why anyone shouldn’t have a chance to make a little money from their social media activity.

There are three ways to share your Sponsored Likes:

• Embed a MyLikes banner/widget on your website (You will be able to adjust the width and height to match your website)
• Post your like on Twitter
• Post your like on your blog or website

Most smaller bloggers cant even recoup their hosting costs using AdSense or other networks, but MyLikes seems to pay out much higher than other CPC solutions. MyLikes is serious about differentiating itself from the likes of Sponsored Tweets, Magpie, and PayPerPost. Not only are they strict about preventing users from gaming the system, but the only way to increase your CPC is to keep it real:

We set a “Cost-per-click” per influencer based on a Influence score that we get by looking at your Twitter stats. Over time, we revised the cost-per-click and influence score up or down based on how relevant her/her likes are to their audience. This way our influencers are incented to send only relevant likes to their audience and not spam them. –Bindu Reddy (Co-Founder)

Founded by ex-Googlers Bindu Reddy (spearheaded a key change in the AdWords bidding system) and Arvind Sundararajan (received two prestigious Founders awards for his work on AdSense and Gmail), MyLikes has some serious potential to stir things up. At very least, they will provide us normal folks with a way to fund all this time we spend online. This could also be the beginnings of a shift in how we see sponsored posts, tweets, and ads in general.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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