What is Junta42, you might ask? From their website:
Junta42 (pronounced juhn-tah or hoon-tah) is defined as “a small group ruling a country immediately after a coup d’état and before a legally constituted government has been instituted.” That’s where we are in today’s marketing environment. It’s the Wild, Wild West, baby. A marketing revolution is taking place. Junta42 is just here to bring a little organization to town.
I like that description! The official “brochure”-type definition of Junta42 explains the service to be an expert and user-generated search engine about content marketing. Searching by category or keyword, you’re given the chance to find relevant content and/or promote the content you like best.
So far, my initial impressions are very positive. I have yet to post an article, but using their search engine to find content has proven to provide good results. Searching on Junta42 yields two different results portions on the results page. The top half brings up results from their own database of submitted content. You can see in the screen shot below from my search on “blogging”, the article, a description, an email option, a link to the full piece as well as the Promote (voting) button appear for each result.
Towards the bottom of this results page are Google Targeted Results. You can see the screen shot of this below. The FAQ spells this feature out pretty nicely:
We all know Google, but these results are different. In order to give Junta42 the best possible results at all time, we have included Google Targeted Results. Junta42 works with Google to search only a specific group of Web sites we feel are relevant to content marketing. So, you get the Junta42 results first, and the best possible Google search results possible at the same time (under the human expert results).
I really do feel like I’m getting highly target, organized results. It is up to Junta42 on who they submit to be a Google Targeted Result website, but as the service grows I think the users will have more say in that. I wonder if sites submitted more often for inclusion will have a higher weight in the search rankings? Might be an interesting feature.
There is one aspect of Junta42’s business plan to watch. They’re making their money by displaying Google Adsense ads on their site. That makes sense. But, they have a program called My42 Revenue which rewards very active contributors with a share of their Google Adsense revenue. Members who contribute over 42 articles a month qualify to receive a share of the revenues. I’ll be curious to see how that plays out. Will people contribute anything to get to the 42? Junta42 has a review process in place for approval of submitted articles so hopefully that will be a solid gatekeeper.
Update: See comments below from Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 stating that it is NOT 42 posts per month, but rather 42 TOTAL posts. I misunderstood that.
The whole idea of paying contributors has popped up recently with some very good discussions being started by Lewis, Mack, and Ryan. Some of the talk has been around blog monetization and rewarding contributors with part of the earned blog revenues. If you haven’t seen the discussion - you should definitely check it out. Obviously, Junta 42 is a little different than a blog, but the theme of paying contributors is the same.
Okay, back to Junta42 as a content search engine for marketers. Check it out and let me know what you think. I’d be curious to hear what you have to say.
Tags: Junta42
