Recently I've been getting requests from people wanting to advertise on some of my sites.

I've been getting so many that I'm thinking of automating the process, ie someone sees my page, clicks the advertise here link, enters the ad info and pays via paypal

However, my advertising experiace is limied to from google adsense and other services with feeds/predefined content........

So, my question is - what features would you like to see if you were advertising on a relevant page/site?

text? quantity of text?
images? logos?
SEO friendly? JS based?

assuming a one-off fee is paid, would you like maximum exposure (like rss syndication, etc)?

If you could reply back with a feature list then that would be great - i can get to work building something cool!

#1 Traffic statistics for your site, #2 Ad placement with logo, accompanied by a short description and site URL (nofollow is fine)

you need to set the parameters of what is offered in terms of size and amount of text - maybe have a selection for the person to choose from.

are you looking for a simular set up to Adbrite  i have not heard great things about them but might give you some pointers

No, I am not looking at doing something like adbrite........not for this project anyway........this project might lead to something similar, but it's scope is beyond the scope of this project

How about i ask the question a different way:

Imagine you're wanting to advertise on someone's website - how could the way you do that be made easy and perfect?

the price needs to be very clear including VAT too (if applicable)
what we get (as advertisers) for our money should be very clear too.

I wouldn't FULLY automate the process though, have somesort of admin approval, and don't take the advertisers money until the approval is done and the ad is live.

Choice is a great thing. Give advertisers a choice of placements (with differing ad sizes) and if possible, allow them to choose the page/s and or section of the site their ad will be placed in. for instance: I'd like to advertise along the left hand side (never at the top), but not on any page that mentions blue widgets. pink widgets are fine as Im advertising pink widgets.
Adding keywords to the ads DB row could help in that

a choice of price for clicks, impressions or time is a good thing too.

If i'm trying to increase brand awareness, impression advertising would be ideal. If i'm trying to drive traffic, then clickthroughs is best for me. Time (eg. pay £XX per month) is an easy way for you to implement, but it's not quite so good for advertisers. if they're paying £XX per month to be in a rotation with 2000 other ads at random. Its possible to never have the ad seen, let alone clicked!

Let us know when you've got something up, i might feel the need to dabble!

Northie wrote:

Imagine you're wanting to advertise on someone's website - how could the way you do that be made easy and perfect?

If you're coding it yourself, I'd automate it with PayPal IPN and only do live set up if the client is verified, otherwise leave it for a human review.

Select which ad slot you want, upload / add the copy, pay and go live.

Easy and perfect means no hassle, idiot proof, no waiting, choice of payment gateways.

Pricing should be clear for the sake of good trading not to mention the law and despite what Grif says take the money before you launch the campaign, that way you're not giving impressions and clicks to someone who's payment might go pear shaped.

Money first then product, not product then money, saves hassle, helps cashflow.

This is all very good

I will be coding this up myself, and may release it as a product/plugin for other php/mysql based sites

My original idea was to have 4 slots per page (i'm plannig a redesign to fit various things in), pay via pay pal on a yearly basis, and as the site doens't get that much traffic at the moment the price won't be that high

The idea of cost per click or impression, as well as time frame is also quite interesting

One of the things the existing inquiries have been mentioning is text-links (ie something that's SEO friendly) so link longevity is a plus

So, for CPC/CPI then it may go to bidding for top spots - but then i have to decide how to priorities against pay per month ads?

All very interesting

Well I'd consider making the duration of the subscription a variable depending on how long the client is willing to commit and would have a feature where you can call an adblock in your pages  template through function.

Want inspiration?

http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/
http://www.openx.org/products
http://www.phplemon.com/adquick-adbrite-clone.php

Enjoy.

I see you're on WordPress now, do you fancy a quick preview of the latest version of my mobile plugin? It serves Google AdSense for Mobile.

oh no! I wasn't saying "set it live, then wait for your money"

What i was saying was this.
if I was paying for advertising, I wouldn't be very happy if the money left my account 3 weeks before the ads went live. Take the details, have it automated so far as a click (from you) away from taking the money and setting the ads live.

You shouldn't rely on PayPal's verification to guarantee the quality of the ads. Many spammers are still verified, afterall, payPal don't give a s**t about their legitimate users money, they aren't gonna worry about their non-legit users. PayPal is a hive of money laundering by it's very nature.

Automating it as far as taking money and getting the ad to the review stage is a good idea, but letting just anyone add anything without your stir?

Cue, "buy my vicodin with a side order of Viagra and lesbo midget porn" aaaalllllllll over your site

Have you looked at  BidVertiser?  They place space on you site and advertisers bid for the ad space. Might be worth looking at.



Don
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