To be fair, they’re also creating 30 new jobs, many of which will be offered to some of the people being laid off, so it’s probably more of a restrategizing of the company, rather than a scaling back. The main reason I’m mentioning this is so that I have an excuse to post this article from last week on Read, Write, Web that seemed, to me at least, really shortsighted.

The RWW item is all about praising Current’s new strategy of using user-generated ads made by evangelical fans, it even shows an HP ad that was made by not an advertising agency that tested VERY well (a survey showed that people liked it 9-to-1 over normal ads! WEIRD!). RWW also goes on to mention that Sony, HP (obviously), and L’Oreal were signed on to participate in the new method, although no revenue numbers were revealed, and says that Current has (pretty much) succeeded at making user-generated ads a viable channel of revenue, and that they’re changing the game.

So here’s my thing, how is this even remotely scalable? Sure, there are definitely brands out there that have fans who are avid enough to do their own evangelical marketing (see: this blog for Nike, other blogs for Apple, the Tumblr community as a whole for Barack Obama, etc), but the thing is, those brands probably don’t need that to pay for that type of advertising because they already get enough free marketing via word of mouth, or their normal ads are good enough to generate the buzz they’re supposed to. To me, the reality seems more to be that any brand that would need/use this sort of advertising, probably isn’t the type of company whose users are going to make any particularly compelling video in the first place.

There’s probably something to creating a rev-share with the user creating the video on a per-stream basis, but really, is that going to be any real amount of money/streams? Is the online film making community really the group that you expect to make homemade commercials for brands willing to pay for them? Is that kid from from American Beauty filming the plastic bag really going to want to make a 45-second viral video for the new Honda Civic?

Someone please let me know if there’s something I’m missing, I just don’t see how this would ever work as anything more than an early, gimmicky, sell to advertisers.