Didja: What’s Old Is New Again

It's interesting what ideas you'll find in the strangest of places. Yesterday's online Variety, for example, was where I found the first mention I've seen of Didja, a site being launched next year by NBC Universal .

The plan for Didja is a niche social/video site, with the focus being on commercials, including TV spots, trailers, and, in this Utopian product ideal, spots created especially for Didja. The site is allegedly scheduled to launch early next year, with USA-SciFi President Bonnie Hammer describing the goal for the site as “[to]“become the go-to destination for on-demand advertising content.”
NBC's vision here is to get a slice of the online video sharing advertising pie for themselves, but there may be a fatal flaw in their plan: we've already seen this site before. AdCritic was a fatality of the first dot-com crash, having shuttered for the first time in December 2001 when the site's traffic turned the site into an unsupportable model. AdCritic was relaunched for a period of time as a premium service in 2002, and now exists as a side project on Ad Age's Creativity Online site.

NBC isn't even the first out of the box with this rehashing of AdCritic. adTV was launched earlier this year, and TBS also launched VeryFunnyAds as a tie-in to their comedy focus.

At this point, Didja is nothing more than a placeholder site with Google syndication ads for didgeridoos. No logo, no coming soon, no splash page to even let you know a site plans on launching. You have to start wondering, as company after company jumps on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, if we aren't reaching the tipping point. Maybe we really are ready for the next big thing.