A couple of days ago I read a post over on Mashable (Link) about a new application getting ready to launch into beta. If you design products for a living – and especially if you’re designing/selling niche products – this might be of interest. It’s called MyPicklist (yes, another “My*”). From the development blog (Link):

An Ad-Creation tool that will allow members to create various sized banner ads that promote highlighted products from your picklist. We are positiong this as a google Ad-Sense alternative. Most people with blogs don’t make that much from those google ads and with this ad tool it will allow bloggers to create revenue from themselves by voicing their product recommendations to their readers.

The more I think about this, the more potential I see in it. Now the revenue sharing feature can, as someone on the Mashable site pointed out, be gamed. However, I have a couple of ideas for how to remedy that and suspect others will as well. This is something that could be made to work, I believe.

A couple of years ago I mentioned on the Core77 forum that I saw a major split coming to the design community: one side corporate, the other independent. Only the independents would be selling product as well; not just consulting. It’s why I cover the topics I do – like rapid-manufacturing – and why I’m so interested in the music, video and publishing businesses. They’re (intangible) product that will lead the way in pointing out mechanisms for reaching (and hopefully keeping) a consumer audience. When fabrication technology finally catches up, the path will have been partially paved through their efforts.

Well, something like MyPicklist might be a taste of the kinds of tools which will be used by independent designers looking to break away from the corporate status quo. If it’s done correctly, that service could be very, very popular.