Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
emberads.com
emberads.com
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
"We're not Google Adsense"
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 will be trying this one for sure.
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.
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.
Over 10,000?
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
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.
A ping script, from the ad network, on the transaction completion page is all that's needed. Pretty straight forward.
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.
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.
We track the clicks and if a product shown on an advert is getting lots of clicks but zero conversions, we swap it out and show alternatives instead.
So we try to make sure that only stuff that will convert is shown.
(we even convert links into affiliate links automatically)
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.
I think it would aid conversion, if you had more examples and perhaps mentioned some websites that use your ads
http://thehodge.co.uk http://eighteensixtyfive.co.uk http://missgeeky.com
Are all running EmberAds
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.
The name and color of the top navbar were close enough to cause me to look who's behind this to make sure it wasn't the same people.
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.
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.
Just sayin'
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 like people voting for one party because their parents voted for the party.