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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

I had an idea at some point, but I do not know it if would be feasible. For me it seems that sponsorships/native ads are better than the usual banner style intrusive ads.

Would it be possible to still have a syndicated ad network, but that it would feed you articles in some structured format, that you would get on your backend, and then insert as articles into your blog/website? This way you could format them any way you want.

Of course the payment model would have to shift from displays to something like overall performance of the ads (by scanning outbound clicks and associating them with purchases) and pay by month. And some policing in order to avoid stuff like getting the ad from the network and never actually displaying it.

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What you describe sounds similar to affiliate marketing [1]: Post a link to external services and get commission for clicks (maybe depending on conversion).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

But in the case of affiliate marketing you get the links and as content creator you create the ad copy. What I was thinking was kind of an automation of these kind of posts: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/23/storyworth

Or some other way to deliver ads with copy and images, but through the backend. (that way the website author has complete power on what an ad actually can do on their website)

Affiliates work fine for E-commerce and performance advertisers that can track conversions. They work considerably less well for cost-per-click advertisers and brand advertisers because the advertisers can't trust the publishers either; there are plenty of spammy publishers who will send fake clicks and impressions your way for $$.

This is the major reason ad networks put JS on publisher sites. You can't give a website author "complete power" any more than you can give an advertiser complete power.

Awesome. I never thought of affiliate marketing as a model for all kinds of ads, but perhaps it can work that way. Is there any affiliate-marketing-hub or something like that?

The problem with affiliate marketing is that you must trust the advertiser in reporting conversions and paying. You can trust Amazon and some other businesses that way, but not a small business.

There isn't a "hub" per se, but it is a rather strong community. Most affiliates operate through the larger affiliate networks as a central location of advertisers, publishers, and tracking.

In most affiliate marketing programs the advertiser doesn't report the conversions - tracking and payment is handled by the affiliate network as an intermediary, which has it's own pros and cons. But they will fight for affiliates when commissions are due.

DM me if you'd like to talk more about that, I work in the industry.

Well, you can still track number of clicks by yourself to get a ballpark figure. You'll just have to believe the conversion number they tell you, but should be able to estimate whether it's realistic or total nonsense based on conversion rate.

I had an idea some time ago that would work somewhat like this: whenever you mention some kind of service or product in your articles, you would link those words to something like "https://myadnetwork.com/<kind-of-service>", then the ad network would redirect the user to some paying advertiser.

Fallback URLs, location (for local businesses) and other customization options could be used to make it work better.

Some _optional_ Javascript could also enhance this, but not change it fundamentally.

Isn't that partly what Skimlinks [0] does? Not only automatically converts product links to affiliate ones, but I think they also link specific product mentions.

[0] https://skimlinks.com/publishers

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