Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

emberads.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#41

Post by rahoulb »

espadagroup wrote: post #13
thehodge wrote: post #2

Hey HN, We've been working on EmberAds for a few months now and I think we are ready to get HN using it, The idea is you paste two lines of code, we match to your content and show ads. We've over 10,000 retailers in our system and work mostly in the UK + US (other countries are coming soon). Instead of being paid per click like adsense, you get paid per action (such as a signup or purchase) we've found this works bet…

I applaud you for taking on this industry though paying on an action is more beneficial to the majority of advertisers than the majority of advertisers, and the advertisers are the side you don't have yet.

It depends a bit on the industry - for example gaming/betting (which I guess won't be relevant to the US, but is in the UK) pays out significant amounts for each conversion, which works out very well for the publishers.

Part of the reason we are doing this is because we know people who do make significant revenue from CPA sites. But they also work very hard at it - writing content, selecting products and A/B testing those products. We are trying to automate the last two steps, so you can concentrate on your content.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#42

Post by barkingllama »

rahoulb wrote: post #36
thwarted wrote: post #24

A friend and I built a similar service back in 2006-2007. It was actually a rev share program based on affiliate aggregators like LinkShare and Commission Junction -- that's how we populated our product list. A quick look at some of the sample vendors mentioned and the affiliate programs they use, I suspect you are doing something similar. Problems we ran into included: trying to normalize the product data from the v…

We are built on top of the feeds from the affiliate networks - and yes, there are issues with some of the data :-) We have about 9 million products in our system (although not all are active) and we regularly inspect it and blacklist products (particularly adult products). The system also tracks which products attract clicks and more importantly convert well, and if they aren't performing, they are disabled. So crapp…

Issues? I find that Commission Junction affiliates can't even get their links right all the time which is basically their entire business. Talk about a "shotgun" approach...

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#43

Post by rahoulb »

rk0567 wrote: post #39
thehodge wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't reply to your comment but it takes about three minutes for it to match properly, if you could email your url to dom@emberads.com I'll take a look

Oh! then I'll try again.

It's showing ads now :-)

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#44

Post by phpnode »

congrats on the site, it looks great. I tried a similar thing with the now defunct pricelive.co.uk several years ago, as others have mentioned the data you get back from affiliate window, linkshare and cj etc is an absolute nightmare to deal with. It would be interesting to try using modern machine learning techniques to deal with this problem now. As far as the content matching goes, are you using elastic search's percolator for this? I always thought that would be a good match for this use case

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#45

Post by TomGullen »

thehodge wrote: post #35
TomGullen wrote: post #34

Is this affiliate advertising (the visitors click must translate into a sale) or do you do CPC/CPM?

Currently CPA but CPM + CPC have been requested and are on our roadmap

Thanks for the reply! Was only asking as with regards to CPM+CPC the major issue for everyone is fraud (to a much greater extend than CPA).

We tried other outlets for serving adverts, but with all of them trust was a huge issue for us which ultimately prevented us moving from Adwords.

Good luck with your business, looks interesting! And if you do move to CPC/CPM I hope you manage to solve the trust issue which so many competitors of yours seem to suffer.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#46

Post by chmodd »

rpm4321 wrote: post #21
billirvine wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments. A ping script, from the ad network, on the transaction completion page is all that's needed. Pretty straight forward.

No, I meant in such a way where a successful conversion couldn't be hidden by the advertiser. They could very easily serve up a completion page with the ad network script missing half the time.

This is known as "shaving" among affiliate marketers and it mostly doesn't matter. E.g. when you are choosing among 10 offers to monetize your traffic, you split test and keep the one that brings you most money, regardless of whether advertisers are honest or not.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#48

Post by rahoulb »

phpnode wrote: post #44

congrats on the site, it looks great. I tried a similar thing with the now defunct pricelive.co.uk several years ago, as others have mentioned the data you get back from affiliate window, linkshare and cj etc is an absolute nightmare to deal with. It would be interesting to try using modern machine learning techniques to deal with this problem now. As far as the content matching goes, are you using elastic search's p…

We have a custom import written for each individual network/feed, so we try to iron out any "quirks" as early as possible.

And for the matching itself, that again is custom-written. I'll be honest - I don't fully understand the maths of it myself (I leave that to the machine learning experts on the team) - but it basically extracts weighted keywords and phrases from your pages, matches them against an index of our products and then alters the weightings as performance data comes in.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#49

Post by kmfrk »

thehodge wrote: post #17
kmfrk wrote: post #14

(we even convert links into affiliate links automatically) How does this play out? Your service looks incredibly interesting, but is there any way I can disable this? I don't want to trade my visitors' goodwill for a few bucks.

You can of course disable it when you generate your adcode you can untick +links :) It works by simply converting a link that you write to amazon.com or thinkgeek.com and adding some affiliate tracking code so if someone clicks on the link and buys something, you can earn some revenue from that :) but yes opt-out is simple (I don't see how your trading visitors goodwill but obviously I'm biased ;) )

Good to know, thanks.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#50

Post by wiradikusuma »

thehodge wrote: post #2

Hey HN, We've been working on EmberAds for a few months now and I think we are ready to get HN using it, The idea is you paste two lines of code, we match to your content and show ads. We've over 10,000 retailers in our system and work mostly in the UK + US (other countries are coming soon). Instead of being paid per click like adsense, you get paid per action (such as a signup or purchase) we've found this works bet…

does this serve international website owners, non-English and Ajax?
Post reply on HN