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Comment by s_q_b | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating. Inefficiency, to me, is opportunity (even if it can't always be leveraged.) A fundamentally different ad network is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. Perhaps I should get more serious. Do you know any resources, or any technical information about how people get started in this space?

@ROFISH: Absolutely a hustle business, but the more experienced I get the more I think that applies to 99.99% of businesses.

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I think this is something that has already started playing out with designer and developer oriented networks like The Deck and Fusion Ads. Better design, standardized rules targeted towards specific groups.

All you need is a niche market and your first advertiser. Then start contacting the publishers in that space. You'll need somebody to help the publishers embed the ad codes. A decent developer could track everything or you could just use Google Analytics or some other commercial tool. Most publishers are willing to try something new, but consider the ad inventory is worth much more to Google (Adsense) because they have a ton more advertisers bidding on the inventory and they're tracking people's interests and so forth.

On the one hand, Google completely ignores 99% of its publishers. On the other hand, the bigger publishers receive advertising proposals all day long every day. So yes the advertiser can contact the publisher directly, they don't really need you, which (last I checked) is against the Adsense/Adwords TOS.

The opportunity is more in the network than the tech. For something like this to work, you have to convince both site owners and advertisers to use your network. (Not that it's a bad idea, but it's like 97% hussle and 3% tech problem.)

I think the "easy" way to shove yourself into the market would be to tackle a niche, so you can specifically target both the advertisers and the publishers that have an audience that would engage with those advertisers. So if you decide to choose, say, online tackle shops on the advertiser side, you'd target fishing blogs on the publisher side. That way you're pretty focused on a niche and don't have to solve difficult ad matchup/inventory problems early on.

The bonus is that if you figure out how to make publishers and advertisers money, you're going to make a lot as well :)

The only real way I'd get on board with a network is if they had access to relevant advertisers in my particular industry that I didn't already have.

I've chosen to direct sell advertisements to companies in my site's industry which takes a lot more work than handing the reins over to a network or dropping in a widget, but the results are definitely worth it.

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