Contextual Ad Engine Recommendations?
The free version of FeedLounge will, like most free services, be supported by advertising. I’ve spent a couple of days trying to find a “perfect” ad provider for the service and have just about given up.
The current front runner is AdBrite, which has a bunch of great self-service tools, along with a system that allows people to bid to buy ads on your site. I was even able to call and talk to someone at AdBrite who knew what he was talking about and was quite helpful. A later follow-up e-mail to support was returned within 12 hours. Good job AdBrite!
The only drawback with AdBrite is the lack of a contextual ad offering. Initially, FeedLounge will definitely have a fairly focused user base, one that should certainly be appealing to various companies who might consider buying ads, however the best solution in my mind is to have contextual ads on a per user basis.
The way a contextual ad system like Google AdSense (or the upcoming Yahoo Publisher offering) works is by serving up ads that it deems to be relevant to the page they are being displayed on. AdSense uses the referring URL to know what page it’s being displayed on, and my guess is that Yahoo Publisher ads will work the same way.
For FeedLounge however, we want to be able to pass in the URL for ad relevance - using the URL of the item a user is reading. We could change the ads every 5-10 items, and pass in the URL of the current item as context. None of the systems I’ve found are able to support this type of usage (or at least they don’t mention it).
I was hoping that by getting through to a human at Google, I’d discover that AdSense had this capability tucked away somewhere. However after (finally) getting a reply, it was explained to me that AdSense can’t be placed in an application or service in the first place - so it’s pretty much out.
Anyone have recommendations?
I’m afraid I don’t have any recommendations, but it sure enough sounds like this might be a niche waiting to be filled…
Host your own server? I use phpAdsNew and it is pretty slick. It can host quite a few different types of ads. You wouldn’t have to worry about a netbreak or anything like that slowing ur site down.
Although it doesn’t do contextual ad service, it does have the capabilities of geotargetting. So your advertisers could advertise for Wisconsin users only, etc…
I know phpAdsNew is free, but there are some different ones I have found that also handle payments themselves. Maybe take a look around at Hotscripts.
I should have added this b4 - maybe u can hack phpAdsNew to do what you want it to.
Well, then we’d have to also run a PHP server for the ads. But the point I was trying to make is that we already have the capability to sell ads space, what we want is to make the ads relevant.
Don’t go the ad route. I hate advertising, particularly as it’s almost always unsolicited. I’d be far more comfortable buying a licence for an ad free version.
The ads will only appear in the free version. Without ads in the free version it would be very difficult to pay for all the expenses associated with each free user. Our hope is that the ads can offset most of these costs.
Why can’t you use Google AdSense? Flickr does it…wait, looks like they switched to Yahoo’s new service.
The major difference FeedLounge and Flickr in this case is that public Flickr photos have a URL that can be crawled and used for relevance for contextual ads. As explained above, for FeedLounge we would want to pass in the URL of the item being displayed as the context (as there is no crawl-able URL) to determine relevance.
Advertising in an aggregator is a legal grey area. And some publishers (like weblogs inc) will get *very* angry about it.
http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000863030958/
Ah gotcha.
Michael - I don’t think that is exactly what we’re talking about here. I’d equate the ads in FeedLounge more closely to the ads in the free/ad version of Opera.
Just to warn you that I think you will get some push-back from bloggers that you are selling ads on their content, especially when you are talking about showing the full text of an item. Individual bloggers probably wont care much, but the guys who make a living off of it like weblogsinc, slashdot, etc. will probably not take too kindly to it.
There is a big difference between showing ads around stuff like headlines, but as soon as you are showing full content I think its bad news.
We are not selling ads on anyone’s content - we are including ads in the interface, just like Opera.
Alex, just so I understand this, you want to give the ad service the url of the item being displayed, correct? Will the ad service then visit that url and use the content on that page to generate the ad which you display in feedlounge? If so, I’m not so sure that’s kosher, and I’d like to see more discussion before it gets implemented.
My understanding of the conversations to date (on other sites) is that what isn’t ok for people is selling advertising that is feed specific. In other words, charging $5/1000 impressions for ads with gizmodo.com content and only $4/1000 impressions for ads with cnn.com content. In that case, you are selling ads based on the content being provided. With FeedLounge, we are not talking about anything of the sort.
Let’s use AdSense as an example. When you put up AdSense on a web site, you never really know what will show up. Even more so if you put them on forums or in a similar area that allows external user input. This is similar to what we want to do with FeedLounge - the ads people would see would be based on the feeds they have subscribed to. However the ads would not be sold based on any external content.
Would we like to have contextual ads? Yes, absolutely. I think contextual ads are a win for both the user and the host. However, contextual ads are not the same as charging money for other’s content, they are just choosing which ads to display.
Regardless, this point is largely moot at the moment because I don’t believe there is a provider that offers a service like this for us to use. More likely, we will be selling the space only using a system like AdBrite.
Thanks for the forthright response, Alex. That was what I was hoping to hear. I do think, however, that you will have some content providers concerned about generating ads for display with their content, and it may be possible to license rss feeds in a way that restricts such use.
Alex to be blunt you wont get away with advertising because of copyright issues. I know because I have been developing a blog index and search engine for months now and that was an issue that came up early in the development when we were thinking about the business model. It is the reason why Google does not serve ads on their news page, and the reason why bloglines also doesn’t. With ads, it can be seen that you are making advertising dollars off of somebody elses content, especially with full-text feeds where the reader will not be clicking through to the source site. A lot of blogs depend on that advertising to support themselves.
Your other question should be, how effective will the ads be? If you charge say, $10 a month for this service for a no-ad version. there is no way you would make anywhere close to that for each user per month from ads - it would be more like 5 cents per user per month. That is why sites like Slashdot charge you $5 not to see the ads, not a massive premium. Plus this model will be broken with the first greasmonkey script for feedlounge that will take the ads out, and then you will forever be playing catch-up and going back on your word.
Hmmm… Technorati shows ads around blog content, but I suppose as a blog search engine they’re driving people to content, so who’d begrudge them a couple of ads. Anyway, I digress…
Feedlounge suppoorts tagging on feeds and items - why not use that data to help serve ads in context? If basing the ads on the content of the feeds seems un-PC in the blogging world that could be a happy medium.
Say if I tag a feed as “Apple” I’d be served ads pointing towards apple products, etc. Of course how well this would work for people who don’t use the tags or use tags such as “work” is another question altogether.
Copyright pertains to redistributing content (your “right” to “copy”). Using content to contextualize an ad is not a violation of copyright, since you are are redistributing anything. If you buy a book, which is certainly copyrighted, do you have the right to take the text of that book, count the number of words, perform statistical analysis on the content, and write about it? I could be wrong, and it would be best to check with a lawyer, but it would seem that this would be OK. I don’t think Google or Bloglines refrained from this approach because of concerns of copyright (Topix.net seems to place contextual ads based on others content and has never had any problems).
The reason Technorati gets away with it is the same reason google gets away with ads while searching, they are only showing a small snippet of the content.
Hey, if the publisher doesn’t like the ads for whatever reason they come up with this week, then they can just stop publishing full-text feeds. Problem solved!
Advertising
My post on the FeedLounge blog discussing contextual ads has spawned some interesting conversation in the comments. Several people feel it would be a very bad thing to put advertising in a feed reader, others don’t have an issue with it.
I̵…
Google does has a way to pass hints via Javascript to its AdSense code. However, you aren’t allowed to use it without permission. Findory.com uses it to show personalised ads.
Another alternative is to write your own system. That’s what I’ve been mucking around with: see http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/tech/2005/7/24/Targeted_advertising.txt
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