

Ask HN: How can I get this working? - aitoehigie

Hi guys,
I am developing an text-to-web advertising platform and I am stuck at a point. Short description of how it works: Any one can text a 140 character message to a short code, and have it displayed on any website that is on the network of the advertising platform. My Problem: How do I display the text ad on the websites that are on the platform? Iframes? Flash?<p>These are my reasons for creating this platform. 1. This product is made with the local market in mind (Nigeria, West Africa), I doubt if this would be a hit in the first world. 2. Due to lack of a reliable payment gateway for local users here in Nigeria, I decided to use premium sms (short code). Once an advertiser texts an ad to the shortcode, his prepaid credit is debited, his ad appears on the target website of his choice and the revenue is shared between the ad platform, the shortcode provider and the website owner. 3. Google adsense or adwords isnt too attractive here in Nigeria because of the hassles of getting paid by google another case of reoccurring online payment gateway issues.
If you have ever implemented something like this, I would really like to have some tips from you.
Disclosure: this has been submitted before, but I didn't really glean much for the few responses gotten.
Thanks
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byoung2
You can use JavaScript, PHP (or any other server side language), and JSON.

Each website in the network gets a unique ID and includes a script tag in
their HTML with the src set to <http://www.example.com/code/?id=12345> where
12345 is the unique ID.

You have your server side script look up that ID and pull the relevant ad data
from your database and return JavaScript that writes this data in a JSON
object and includes functions to write it to the browser.

When the visitor goes to the site, the browser renders the page with the
JavaScript customized for that site, which displays the appropriate ad. Your
server side code should track the number of impressions for each add and
integrate with your billing/payment system.

------
Tichy
Not sure if I correctly understand your problem, but you might want to look
into JSONP.

~~~
aitoehigie
an example, how does google display text ads on 3rd party sites? do they use
Iframes?, JSON? that is my main challenge now.

~~~
Tichy
Why not check the adwords script? My guess would be JSONP (note the "P").
certainly the starting point is a JavaScript.

