Advertising Networks

According to TechCrunch, Google has just acquired Feedburner, a web feed management company for $100 million. This was previously a rumor but now has been confirmed by Michael Arrington, who says that the deal mostly involves upfront cash payment by Google.

Interesting news for publishers currently running Feedburner’s advertising program because it’s likely that Google might integrate its Adsense contextual ad network with Feedburner.

Feedburner has a large inventory of publishers currently using their services and it would make sense for Google to tap these current users instead of relaunching or promoting Adsense for Feeds, Google’s RSS advertising program which has been in a perpetual closed beta since 2005.

Jeremy Schoemaker aka Shoemoney and the owner of this famous Adsense check has put up a nice little video about his presentation at the recent 2007 New York Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Part of a panel on contextual advertising which included Jennifer Slegg, Jeremy’s presentation was mainly centered around his personal experiences on making money with contextual ad programs like Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network.

The video in question was 27 mins long video and was a brief introduction to contextual advertising, primarily from a publisher’s perspective. I took some notes on Shoemoney’s suggestions and made a short list of the key points:

RSS Feeds are a powerful internet marketing tool that’s taken on several variants. Amazon.com uses feeds to help users keep track of bestseller releases. Wordpress.org uses feeds to deliver news on the latest Wordpress developments.

Websites like AbsurdlyCool.com uses feeds to distribute information about freebies and coupons. ReviewMe uses blog feeds to give advertisers a snapshot glimpse of publisher content and most affiliate companies offer RSS feeds for promotional use.

For bloggers, a RSS feed is mainly a content delivery and syndication system that allows readers to have access to your content without visiting your website.

Robin Good has written a nice article on some other contextual advertising programs, apart from Adsense. There’s a whole bunch of advertising networks I haven’t experimented with, some of which include AdSonar, Mirago, Target Point and Q-ads.

The good news is, they don’t necessarily have to be alternatives, now that Google has allowed other contextual ads to be run alongside Adsense.

I’m not currently optimizing Adsense for Dosh Dosh, so I may run some monetization and placement tests for these programs. Anyone used these Adsense Alternatives before?

I recently started using Kontera on Dosh Dosh a few days ago and some of you might have noticed the cute little ad boxes that show up when you hover over certain links. Kontera is a contextual advertising network that offers In Text advertising based on keywords within a body of text.

Known as ContentLink, these specific words are double underlined and will reveal small bubble like boxes with an advert, whenever you move your mouse cursor over them. Clicking on the text in the ad will take you to the advertiser’s web page.

AdVolcano is yet another ad network which connects advertisers with bloggers or webmasters seeking to monetize their website with the placement of advertisements. According to Entrepreneur’s Journey, AdVolanco allows you to “define areas of your blog.. and charge a monthly fee, rather than a cost per click, cost per action or cost per impression method.”

This literally means that you can offer time-based ad campaigns. For example, you might want to sell some space on your sidebar for the price of $10 a day or $250 for 30 days. Here are some points I’ve made after signing up and digging around their website.

Vizu Answers is a ad network that allows you monetize your website by including interactive poll widgets that provide targeted content to your audience. How does this work? After registering for an account and choosing a poll template that fits your website, simply copy and paste the code for the widget on any place on your website. You’ll make money on a CPM (cost per thousand page views) basis. Here’s something you don’t expect: As a publisher, you’ll get to set the minimum CPM price for each poll you put up on your web page. More details below: