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Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

emberads.com

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Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#31

Post by thehodge »

billirvine wrote: post #12
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…

> we've found this works better with sites that add value I haven't. CPA tends to be the last resort of desperation for publishers -- unless, of course, the publisher's site is focused on the kinds of products advertised in the CPA network. Even still, realized CPM will be low.

We've had requests from both publishers and retailers for CPC / CPM pricing and our system is built to handle that, it's just a case of finding some time in the schedule to build and promote it!

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#32

Post by thehodge »

thehodge wrote: post #8
_b8r0 wrote: post #7

Congrats on launching this. You've picked quite a battle and quite a market to get into but hope it all goes well.

Thanks, it's not going to be easy but I think our matching is brilliant and we have a fantastic team :)

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

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#36

Post by rahoulb »

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 crappy ads don't get shown, once the system has noticed that they are crappy.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#39

Post by rk0567 »

thehodge wrote: post #32
thehodge wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, it's not going to be easy but I think our matching is brilliant and we have a fantastic team :)

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.

Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense

#40

Post by thwarted »

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…

Unfortunately, we never reached the scale where we could exercise product blacklisting, and even 50k products were difficult to vet manually. And I had written significant code to help seek and destroy affiliate feed data problems which helped a lot but still ate up a lot of time.

The major data hygiene issue was that the affiliate networks tried to pigeon hole every product into the same schema. I think this was largely due to their major users being non-technical and their feed format being CSV based (so people could manipulate it in Excel)--this was the only time in my life that I wished for an XML set up, one that had different schemas for different products (this is why Amazon was attractive, they do this, but it's still not 100%. While Amazon has a large product category tree, a lot stuff still ends up being pigeon holed, especially if it's a specialty product). The worst part was the "extra" fields that the vendor could use for anything, some used them for keywords, others for deeper hierarchical categorization. I think my favorite was the "category" fields which were chevron delimited phrases within a single CSV field.

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