Thoughts on building a Contextual Ad Program

[Danny Carlton]

I've been doing some freelance scripting for a publisher with some sizeable niche sites, which includes two blog hosting sites with over 10,000 blogs combined. I've been mentioning the idea of building their own contextual ad program to put together the advertisers they already have for their various sites and the individual bloggers on their blog hosting sites. All of their sites are in a somewhat narrow niche, and they have tons of contacts with advertisers for that niche. Admittedly Google and the other contextual ad programs have a larger pool of advertisers and publishers, but I'm wondering if that size of a group would be worth building a program specifically for them. There's a chance they could expand it in the future, outside their own sites, into other sites in that niche. Would it be more of a headache than it's worth, or would a smaller, topic specific contextual ad program be feasable for that size of a group?

[ricklomas]

Why bother? Google has more advertisers than you could ever imagine. That is the point of this forum. It's like saying "lets re-design the Aston Martin, maybe some people will buy our one instead!"
By the way if anyone DOES want to see a Corgi Aston Martin spinning around on a jam jar have a look here http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1247188223

[Danny Carlton]

You seem to have not noticed that this section is titled "Other Contextual Ad Programs". So obviously, someone, somewhere thinks there's some merit in having other programs besides Google.

As for why to not use Google. Google can be unpredictable when placing ads even when you've jumped through all the hoops. In this particular case, though, having their own ad progroam allows them to do what Google does with theirs, insert in-house ads. It becomes a way of cross marketing yet on other people's sites.

[ricklomas]

Fair enough Danny, just seemed like there was a lot of work involved building a 'contextual' advertising program. Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh:( - Adsense is very clever in that it geo-targets, recognizes languages etc. Maybe making your own 'not so contextual' ad program may be the way to go? My problem has always been getting the money out of advertisers, so I am a bit synical.

[Reprobate]

You really want someone onboard who has done it before, otherwise you'll probably make all the mistakes that they would have made and will lose a lot of time and money in the process.

At the end of the day it'd be a big task to pull off, I can imagine that there's so many things involved that it would be a daunting one at that.

Building something from scratch isn't easy. A little over five years ago I had someone approach me to work on creating a personals site. I sat down with the guy in the interview and he told me all the things I'd need to be able to do. Most of which I couldn't. And I told him that.

He asked me if I knew someone who could to all the bits I couldn't do. And I did. The following week after I started (I started the design, layout, css, and started working on ideas for marketing and promotion) a friend of mine started. A week after that ANOTHER friend of ours started.

It was good steady work for 6 months. Though in the end it died (a year after I finished). Not through lack of trying. AND there was an investor involved. While I'm not sure on the exact amount of money that ended up being frittered away I reckon it was $500,000. Though not all of that went towards wages, hardware and software. The guy that was running the show (who interviewed me, he had a gift of the gab and managed to get this well to do businessman to bankroll the project) used the investors various credit cards as an expense account.

The thing is that if I knew then what I know now... you know the old saying, hindsight being 20/20.

The unfortunate thing, at least in this scenario, is that what I know now is that back then was the best time to do what we did. Now isn't.

We made a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong turns. There was a lot of guess work involved. If we had someone who had done it all before... ahhhhh, missed opportunities.

If we got put together a team that's on the ball, willing to learn new tricks, have a never say die attitude... and can pay them AND you do all your homework, you may just pull it off. Provided you got the funds and a good dose of luck.

If you can get someone who has done it all before then you may not need that measure of luck.

Of course whether it be a miserable failure or a resounding success you'll probably spend quite a while with a decent sized headache.

Would it be more of a headache than it's worth? You'll never know unless you give it a go.

Personally I'd stick with Adsense. And use the resources and talent on hand to create some other whiz-bang sites and aim for world domination funded by Adsense revenue.

[fm1234]

posted by ricklomas:

Why bother? Google has more advertisers than you could ever imagine. That is the point of this forum. It's like saying "lets re-design the Aston Martin, maybe some people will buy our one instead!"


In a somewhat ironic twist, the guy who designed the modern Aston left the company and makes his own cars now ... I forget the brand name offhand but read about them in the recent RR 2007 autos issue.

Legend has it that Enzo Ferrari had similar derisive comments onhand when approached with a sports car idea by an Italian tractor manufacturer. "Stick to what you know," he said. So the tractor manufacturer, Ferruccio Lamborghini, went back to making tractors and that was the last anyone ever heard from him. Or something.

All day long we in the affiliate and AdSense world hear and talk about niches, niches, niches. But the idea of niche targeting on the "infrastructure" itself -- affiliate sites, ad programs, auctions, whatever -- is always poo-pood. Niches are powerful even for framework applications. I happen to own a niche targeted ad service similar to AdSense but with a much more narrow focus -- I won't link it here, as I wouldn't want the post to be misconstrued as spam -- and while it is very very very insignificantly minute compared to Google, sites within that niche do fairly well off of it. I also own a niche auction site which competes, of all silly things, with eBay, and in fact has been growing slowly but steadily for years and makes a profit because it targets the pointless bans and restrictions that eBay puts on its sellers, offering them a targeted niche selling platform with lower fees and virtually zero interference from management (aside obviously from trafficking in illegal items/services.)

With the kind of network available that Danny is describing above, it would be stupid for the hosting provider to not offer some sort of ad network -- even if it was as simple as offering blog publishers to advertise on one another's blogs only.