Show Your Ad Here opens

by Sapphire (February 4, 2008)

Mark’s ShowYourAdHere has opened (yeah, I’m a couple days late to break that news). This is a third-party service to let you set up your own ad zones and sell ad space to customers. Mark is only taking a 25% cut, which I feel is quite fair considering (a) how much the other guys take and (b) he’s paying to run a server to host ads, among other costs. And he’s got to make money for his time spent. And you get paid instantly instead of having to wait to the end of the month or Net-30 or whatever the other guys’ delays are.

You can set up your own ads to run in your slots until you sell the space. And really, you should do this so advertisers can see where their ads will run. There’s also a feedback system where advertisers and publishers can leave feedback about their dealings with one another.

I love the advertiser guidelines he’s posted. Seriously. Most third-party ad servers are only too happy to serve crap ads that are offensive, particularly if you’re not targeting horny 13 year old boys. Some of my favorite guidelines are:

1. Your ads will never contain partial nudity, full nudity, or pornography. Sexual & adult content is not permitted.

Thank you! Not only can this stuff offend viewers and be inappropriate for kids… some of it’s so sexist you’d think we were still living in the 1950’s.

6. You will always support advertised prices, discounts, and free offers. Info in your ad will always be accurate.

This is just one example: he covers many variations of “Your ad should not contain lots of bullshit because it annoys people.” Well said.

15. Your ads will never promote miracle cures.

Aw, there go the Hoodia ads. They’ll be sorely missed. NOT!

All in all, it looks like a great setup with a potential to become even cooler. If you have suggestions or thoughts, I recommend posting them in his thread where he asks how to make it better. The main thing at this point is whether or not the marketplace will find it. That’s always key. Text-Link-Ads didn’t have the best system or software or anything - they had the best marketplace, and that’s why they dominated.

One thing I had hoped for on this was text links. I thought he was going to offer no-follow text links, too. Which Alex Choo is already doing via the WP-Text-Ads plugin and his Del.icio.us marketplace, but (a) it’s just for Wordpress and (b) the marketplace doesn’t seem to have been found by enough people just yet. I think there’s still a lot of room for someone to penetrate the no-follow text link ad market, so that was my suggestion to Mark.

One other thing that you should be aware of is that there’s no way for you to screen ads before they go live. You can cancel them as soon as you see something that offends you, but there’s nothing to stop the advertiser from leaving bad feedback. Mark suggests making it very clear in your ad page what you will and won’t accept - then if you turn away an ad that violates your rules, the person can’t really complain that s/he didn’t have any way of knowing. I think Mark’s guidelines are actually sufficient for my sites at the moment (he’s banned all the industries I don’t want to deal with, but I may put in a relevancy clause - except I’ve never been convinced ads must be relevant to what people are reading in order to attract their interest). But you may want to be aware of this if you have, say, a site for Republicans who might be deeply offended if suddenly you’re running a (perfectly guideline-abiding) ad for Democrats.

Posted in Tools
Subscribe to the feed or email updates