
Show HN: an alternative to AdSense - thehodge
http://emberads.com/
======
thwarted
A friend and I built a similar service back in 2006-2007. It was actually a
rev share program based on affiliate aggregators like LinkShare and Commission
Junction -- that's how we populated our product list. A quick look at some of
the sample vendors mentioned and the affiliate programs they use, I suspect
you are doing something similar.

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.

~~~
rahoulb
We are built on top of the feeds from the affiliate networks - and yes, there
are _issues_ with some of the data :-)

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.

~~~
thwarted
Unfortunately, we never reached the scale where we could exercise product
blacklisting, and even 50k products were difficult to vet manually. And I had
written significant code to help seek and destroy affiliate feed data problems
which helped a lot but still ate up a lot of time.

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.

------
thehodge
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

~~~
espadagroup
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.

~~~
rahoulb
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.

------
nckbz
I don't feel like loosely targeted PayPerAction ads will do all that well.
From a publishers perspective it will almost definitely do worse than AdSense
just based on the PPA component. For advertisers this might be nice, but why
would they use this when publishers using other PPA platforms like CJ, CB, or
LS can build custom tailored websites and landing pages per ad to convert
users.

------
davidcollantes
It is good (?) to see competition. Yet, I would like ads to be beautiful, at
the very minimum. Yours do not nicely blend in. Ads well done are those coming
from 'The Deck', for example.

~~~
thehodge
We are working on different ads styles all the time to make sure they convert,
I've see the Deck ones before and whilst they look good, I believe they are
paid on a CPM basis so are more for branding than actual clicks (but that
doesn't mean we won't try an adstyle that looks like that).

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

------
tamping
If you're being paid per action, are you not then relying on the ability of
the advertisers to convert your clicks?

~~~
rpm4321
Also, you're kind of at the advertiser's mercy on how reliable they are about
reporting conversions, right? I can't see how the ad network could audit
conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments.

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.

~~~
billirvine
> I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty,
> unless they were also processing the payments.

A ping script, from the ad network, on the transaction completion page is all
that's needed. Pretty straight forward.

~~~
rpm4321
No, I meant in such a way where a successful conversion couldn't be hidden by
the advertiser. They could very easily serve up a completion page with the ad
network script missing half the time.

~~~
chmodd
This is known as "shaving" among affiliate marketers and it mostly doesn't
matter. E.g. when you are choosing among 10 offers to monetize your traffic,
you split test and keep the one that brings you most money, regardless of
whether advertisers are honest or not.

~~~
rahoulb
We try to do this automatically. If a product attracts clicks but doesn't
convert then we disable it temporarily, to give other products a chance to be
shown in their spot.

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.

------
kmfrk

        (we even convert links into affiliate links automatically)
    

How does this play out? Your service looks incredibly interesting, but is
there any way I can disable this? I don't want to trade my visitors' goodwill
for a few bucks.

~~~
thehodge
You can of course disable it when you generate your adcode you can untick
+links :)

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 ;) )

~~~
kmfrk
Good to know, thanks.

------
netfire
A few things bug me with the site design

\- 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.

------
kmfrk
Maybe I am running some kind of ad-blocker, but I don’t see any example ads,
when I cycle through the different ad size options. If this is not just me,
could you include an example?

I think it would aid conversion, if you had more examples and perhaps
mentioned some websites that use your ads

~~~
thehodge
sure

<http://thehodge.co.uk> <http://eighteensixtyfive.co.uk>
<http://missgeeky.com>

Are all running EmberAds

------
TomGullen
Is this affiliate advertising (the visitors click must translate into a sale)
or do you do CPC/CPM?

~~~
thehodge
Currently CPA but CPM + CPC have been requested and are on our roadmap

~~~
TomGullen
Thanks for the reply! Was only asking as with regards to CPM+CPC the major
issue for everyone is fraud (to a much greater extend than CPA).

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.

------
reedlaw
At first I thought this had something to do with <http://emberjs.com/>

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.

~~~
rahoulb
Heh - yeah. We chose our name ages ago (no real reason behind it other than
the domain was available), but we figured there wasn't much overlap (we did
rename our main javascript file from ember.js to pineapple.js just to reduce
potential confusion though).

------
phpnode
congrats on the site, it looks great. I tried a similar thing with the now
defunct pricelive.co.uk several years ago, as others have mentioned the data
you get back from affiliate window, linkshare and cj etc is an absolute
nightmare to deal with. It would be interesting to try using modern machine
learning techniques to deal with this problem now. As far as the content
matching goes, are you using elastic search's percolator for this? I always
thought that would be a good match for this use case

~~~
rahoulb
We have a custom import written for each individual network/feed, so we try to
iron out any "quirks" as early as possible.

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.

------
jasonlingx
I noticed there is no approval process. How do you deal with inappropriate
content like adult or gambling sites which may breach the TOS of the affiliate
networks you work with?

------
shell0x
Seems like adblock got a new entry in the list. Seriously guys, aren't there
any alternatives to ads? I just used a PC without adblock yesterday and the
browsing experience was horrible. Popups, which hide the content and have no
close button(appears after 10 seconds), blinking ads, flash ads and other
colorful ads. I'd never buy any product just because it was advertised
somewhere. Thats the reason why I still stick with adblock and noscript!

~~~
ig1
What made you decide to buy your current brand of toothpaste ?

~~~
Vivtek
My family has used Colgate toothpaste since the 60's. Do you really look to
advertising to decide on toothpaste choices?

~~~
rahoulb
Slightly OT, but there are many different layers to advertising. We do CPA -
which means you don't earn without performing an action (normally buying
something). But your family probably uses Colgate because of brand awareness
advertising.

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.

------
iuguy
Congrats on launching this. You've picked quite a battle and quite a market to
get into but hope it all goes well.

~~~
thehodge
Thanks, it's not going to be easy but I think our matching is brilliant and we
have a fantastic team :)

~~~
thehodge
I can't reply to your comment but it takes about three minutes for it to match
properly, if you could email your url to dom@emberads.com I'll take a look

~~~
rk0567
Oh! then I'll try again.

~~~
rahoulb
It's showing ads now :-)

------
huskyr
Does your service uses document.write() like Google Adsense? That, for me, is
one of my main gripes with it...

~~~
rahoulb
No, we insert iFrames into the DOM.

~~~
huskyr
Right, nice work!

------
yahelc
The signup form says "password1 is not a secure password", but doesn't reject
"password1" as a password.

------
extesy
How is it different from <http://prosperent.com>?

------
egonschiele
What is the advantage of using Ember Ads instead of AdSense?

~~~
gcp
AdSense can throw you out with no explanation given or appeal possible. Just
being an alternative is reason enough to exist.

~~~
jasonlingx
To be fair I am sure Ember can do the same. But yes, we do need alternatives.

------
PaulHoule
This targets the UK? What if I'm in some other market?

~~~
thehodge
If your in the US we show US ads, if your in Germany we show german ads (other
regions are coming soon as we get the networks, retailers and integration
done)

------
jasonlingx
What's the average eCPM you getting publishers?

