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 vendors into a format usable to make actionable and accurate ads--the aggregators practiced very little data hygiene and did not enforce much consistency, oddly, some vendors couldn't even spell the names of their products correctly which made for some pretty crappy looking ads; at one point we had over 4 million products listed, primarily because we started importing Amazon products and vendors, so the product selection was difficult, some things have general appeal and would show up all the time and others wouldn't match much content at all; we had trouble signing up sites to display the ads, CPA was relatively new at the time for the scale we were going for, we might have been better off selling our tech to the top affiliate aggregators as a better, easier method for sites to integrate affiliate program membership; reporting was a real bitch because of the delay from click through to actual purchase to the payment showing up, which depending on the affiliate program could be upwards of 90 days.
In retrospect, we would have better off setting it up for passive income and not try to do active sales to integrator websites and instead shored up the pitch copy and made it largely self service for the integrators (it mostly was already, but I spent a lot of time tweaking the matching algorithm rather than on the sales/pitch side), and pitched it as an easier way to join affiliate networks. That would have set expectations a little better than calling it an "ad network" like AdSense, which we also considered our main competitor.
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.
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.
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...
Thanks for the advice, we are doing something similar yeah but we haven't normalised the products so much, we care more about that specific product from that retailer.
We are currently talking to some of the networks and affiliates about using our technology directly as well, as they seem to like our matching
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 better with sites that add value.
If you have any questions or want to get in touch, a lot of the team is on HN or you can ping me at dom@emberads.com
NOTE :: If you paste the code and see dresses, groupon ads or something less relevant, it means that we haven't matched your page yet (this usually takes around a minute or two).
If after a few minutes it's still not matched, please let me know using the email address above or @emberads your url and our team will look into it
Not seeing any US advertisers (except Staples) that I recognize.
"you get paid per action "
A quick look at your marketing doesn't make that apparent. It was a question that I had.
In order to get the US market, you will need to brand a site and show examples using US dollars.
You also should point out in your marketing exactly why you are "an alternative to adsense". That isn't appearing anywhere, once again from a quick look, which is what most busy potential customers will be doing.
> 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!
Sorry Dom but I think unless you have CPC/CPM pricing you have no right of calling this Adsense replacement. 2-3 years back I would be applauding for launching something that could have potential to be an Adsense competitor but these days there are tons of ad-networks that monetize sites on CPM level quite well. I don't see how any publisher who has some experience in monetizing content would go for your CPA solution when there are CPM/CPC networks which user can make more money with.
Best wishes to you but I just want to reiterate what larrys says.
Your home page could really do with a one-sentence description of what makes you different from adsense (and saying "Effortlessly serve the best ads" doesn't count - that's just blah-blah stuff)
I am just happy to see competing services in this space. Adsense has shut off many publishers and stonewalled them. It could happen to you, and it could happen to me too. We have to embrace new services and nurture them.
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.
The code is built for non-english and international sites - if you visit from the US, we show US-relevant ads, if you visit from Germany, we show german-relevant ads - and the matching is language agnostic.
But, inventory-wise, we have concentrated on UK and US adverts so far (with some German and Swiss adverts too). This is just a matter of time - getting hold of the feeds and importing them - rather than any technical issues.
Lastly, we can't deal with AJAX sites yet - but if the system can access the content that will eventually be shown (by doing the same GET as the AJAX request) then there is a way round it - rahoul@emberads.com if you'd like to know more. Getting AJAX working properly is something we have on our roadmap, but we've not had time to look at it yet.
I don't feel like loosely targeted PayPerAction ads will do all that well. From a publishers perspective it will almost definitely do worse than AdSense just based on the PPA component. For advertisers this might be nice, but why would they use this when publishers using other PPA platforms like CJ, CB, or LS can build custom tailored websites and landing pages per ad to convert users.
It is good (?) to see competition. Yet, I would like ads to be beautiful, at the very minimum. Yours do not nicely blend in. Ads well done are those coming from 'The Deck', for example.
We are working on different ads styles all the time to make sure they convert, I've see the Deck ones before and whilst they look good, I believe they are paid on a CPM basis so are more for branding than actual clicks (but that doesn't mean we won't try an adstyle that looks like that).
We've built our system to be quite flexible, we can make changes and push it across the whole network or just a small part within minutes for a nice a/b test
Also, you're kind of at the advertiser's mercy on how reliable they are about reporting conversions, right? I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments.
I would be very interested in hearing how it's done if I'm wrong, though.
I suppose it's kind of the same with an affiliate program, but on an ad network with thousands of participants, it seems much more uncertain.
We partner with the major affiliate networks to use the conversion tracking they have, We also do regular test transactions to make sure that it works.
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.
We try to do this automatically. If a product attracts clicks but doesn't convert then we disable it temporarily, to give other products a chance to be shown in their spot.
So if the retailer is cheating, then their products should not be shown very often - and products that do convert should be shown in their place.
You still require honesty from the advertiser. Whats to stop the advertiser omitting the script on every nth completion page to reduce their outgoings? Maybe omitting it for high value orders as test orders are likely to be low value, whitelisting the ad networks known ip ranges etc.
Yes. And full-circle dishonesty is inherent in upstart/third-tier ad networks (not necessarily the network, but their advertising clients typically).
But in the semi-perfect world of advertisers really trying to sell product, and ad networks with code optimized to make that happen, it works well. If product "A" from retailer "X" is converting well, the system should promote that over products that aren't converting -- and the only way to automatically know is the action-complete ping.
But yes, deception is one of the primary reasons content publishers avoid CPA networks.
We've also got something similar to them, in that we can rewrite links on the fly, converting them into revenue-earning links, if they match one of our merchants.
You are right, it does take scale to do this well. I'm CEO at Skimlinks, so although a little biased, I can assure you Skimlinks is at the same if not greater scale. Our uptime and speed is the best in the industry, as you can see from our public pingdom page http://api-status.skimlinks.com/554403/2012/10
And all this is while processing 230million clicks a month. Even Hurricane Sandy didn't affect our uptime. Our CTO wrote a great piece about it here:
http://blog.skimlinks.com/2012/10/25/the-importance-of-globa...
(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 ;) )
- The header background at the top of the page seems strange, not exactly sure what it is (wood logs?). It makes the white text harder to read and doesn't seem consistent with the feel of the rest of the site.
- The vertical whitespace between the different elements on the site seems off. Different heights and smaller towards the top, with a lot more whitespace between elements further down on the page.
Maybe I am running some kind of ad-blocker, but I don’t see any example ads, when I cycle through the different ad size options. If this is not just me, could you include an example?
I think it would aid conversion, if you had more examples and perhaps mentioned some websites that use your ads
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.
Heh - yeah. We chose our name ages ago (no real reason behind it other than the domain was available), but we figured there wasn't much overlap (we did rename our main javascript file from ember.js to pineapple.js just to reduce potential confusion though).
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
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.
I noticed there is no approval process. How do you deal with inappropriate content like adult or gambling sites which may breach the TOS of the affiliate networks you work with?
Seems like adblock got a new entry in the list. Seriously guys, aren't there any alternatives to ads? I just used a PC without adblock yesterday and the browsing experience was horrible. Popups, which hide the content and have no close button(appears after 10 seconds), blinking ads, flash ads and other colorful ads. I'd never buy any product just because it was advertised somewhere. Thats the reason why I still stick with adblock and noscript!
> I just used a PC without adblock yesterday and the browsing experience was horrible. Popups, which hide the content and have no close button(appears after 10 seconds), blinking ads, flash ads and other colorful ads.
Exaggerate much?
How much horrible would the "browsing experience" be without the sites to which you "browsed" since advertising is _currently_the_only_monetization_model available to online publishers wishing to provide free content?
But seriously, your gross-exaggeration is in-line with every other slashdot refugee I've seen. The truth is very different (unless you've visiting dodgy sites), I've never browsed with an ad-blocker as I feel ads are a fair exchange for the efforts of those trying to provide free content. And, I've never had the experience you're attempting to pass as reality.
Slightly OT, but there are many different layers to advertising. We do CPA - which means you don't earn without performing an action (normally buying something). But your family probably uses Colgate because of brand awareness advertising.
When you are faced with a choice of items for the first time, all those billboards, TV ads, product placements and so on are all subconsciously recalled and push you towards a decision.
That's great. I just installed on my blog, but the ads are very un-relevant(mostly about women dresses) to my topic (free and open source softwares, tools etc).
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
If your in the US we show US ads, if your in Germany we show german ads (other regions are coming soon as we get the networks, retailers and integration done)
Problems we ran into included: trying to normalize the product data from the vendors into a format usable to make actionable and accurate ads--the aggregators practiced very little data hygiene and did not enforce much consistency, oddly, some vendors couldn't even spell the names of their products correctly which made for some pretty crappy looking ads; at one point we had over 4 million products listed, primarily because we started importing Amazon products and vendors, so the product selection was difficult, some things have general appeal and would show up all the time and others wouldn't match much content at all; we had trouble signing up sites to display the ads, CPA was relatively new at the time for the scale we were going for, we might have been better off selling our tech to the top affiliate aggregators as a better, easier method for sites to integrate affiliate program membership; reporting was a real bitch because of the delay from click through to actual purchase to the payment showing up, which depending on the affiliate program could be upwards of 90 days.
In retrospect, we would have better off setting it up for passive income and not try to do active sales to integrator websites and instead shored up the pitch copy and made it largely self service for the integrators (it mostly was already, but I spent a lot of time tweaking the matching algorithm rather than on the sales/pitch side), and pitched it as an easier way to join affiliate networks. That would have set expectations a little better than calling it an "ad network" like AdSense, which we also considered our main competitor.