Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Flycast Agreement
Author: Johnathan Grant Posted: 11/22/1999; 2:09:02 PM Topic: Flycast Agreement Msg #: 13259 (In response to 13151) Prev/Next: 13258 / 13260
I agree that Mark Welch has an excellent resource on web advertising at http://www.adbility.com/.However, I think you could do better to concentrate on associate programs (also known as affiliate programs). Allan Gardyne has an excellent site on them at http://www.associateprograms.com/.
I think that Frontier would be very good at implementing them - maybe in the style Yahoo links to Amazon. (When you search at Yahoo, you get a link to Amazon that has your search terms already entered.) Maybe a Frontier-based system could either look at the content of the page or the content of the user's preferences (if a cookie is present) to determine what ad(s) to show or which program(s) to link to.
Presumably, each ad could be given certain basic target keywords that would be matched against the page content and maybe the top 1 or 2 ads in terms of how often target keywords appear could be served with that page. Maybe there could even be a keyword dictionary from A to Z that ads could be randomly rotated through so that, over time, the ads could adjust themselves to become more profitable. I think it would be surprising to see which ads got the highest response rate to certain keywords.
If all this seems confusing, there is one banner exchange that already claims to do this on the web with their ad banners. SmartClicks at http://www.smartclicks.com/ runs banners randomly until enough data is gathered, at which point the banner is moved into the category(ies) that garnered the highest click-thru rate.
What do you think? Would privacy concerns override using someone's personal preferences to target an ad? Over time, would a system that adjusts ads for profitability lead to authors conciously or unconciously writing only pieces that are "profitable", for better or worse?
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:36 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.