What Wesabe Learned from Google Adsense
November 19, 2006
What will be the most useful tool on Wesabe? I predict it will be context sensitive financial tips.
Personalized Advice
A person could spend 24 hours a day reading financial advice on the Internet and never get through it all. What we need to make our financial decisions more quickly and effectively is information targeted to our life situation.
Google came up with its Adsense / Adwords tandem to deliver targeted advertising to users. In the same way, Wesabe is using contextual advice to deliver money saving tips to its users based on their spending habits and their financial goals.
Advisor vs. Accountant
One of the items listed on the Wesabe FAQ page is “What makes your product unique?”. The part of the answer that sticks out is “we show you ways to start saving money based on your actual spending.”
So instead of a ledger system like Microsoft Money or Intuit’s Quicken that helps you “figure out where your money went”, Wesabe is somewhat like a spending advisor that can “help you figure out how to get more from your money” and tie your spending habits to your goals.
The value of Wesabe’s contextual financial tips is based on the size and contributions of its user base. Just as the success of Adwords and Adsense depended on the popularity and usage of Google’s search engine; the success of Wesabe’s contextual tips will be dependent on how well this web based tool manages the details of entering and managing personal finance information.
Find Out For Yourself
In order to build their base Wesabe is offering free membership at its Pro level for all of 2007 if you sign up and create an account in 2006. I signed up for one today and am eager to check out what Wesabe has to offer. For more information on things such as setting up an account, offering tips, tagging transactions, and privacy read a review over at Get Rich Slowly.
All posts by Ben Edwards
Ben,
I wish we were smart enough to have learned that from Google. What drove the idea of context dependent tips was that we knew we didn’t know what was a good idea everywhere (known unknowns). Frankly we couldn’t possibly scale that sort of knowledge, but if each member shared a little of what they new the sum value would be massive.
We also believe that the knowledge contributed by our users belongs to them, so if they are sharing tips they are made available to everyone. We haven’t opened the site up to non-registered people yet, but that is a limitation of engineering not interest. In short order anyone will be able to browse the tip and goal database.
Thank you for visiting the site and thank you for writing about us. Let me know how the service is working for you.