Hacker News Reader

Comment by thehodge | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

"UK + US"

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.

In Hungary ember means people. :) So this is ads for the people.

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 have an idea for such a sentence!

"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.

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.

You used advertisers twice. Do you mean publishers the second time?

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.

does this serve international website owners, non-English and Ajax?

At the moment we have no "none english" inventory but we are working on it :)

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.

> We've over 10,00

Over 10,000?

Yeah sorry I was at a charity hack weekend and I'm still a little tired :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com