

Ad Mates - I show you, you show me - dhotson
http://admates.net/

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KevinMS
This idea is so old, doesn't anybody remember last century?

<http://web.archive.org/web/19961224043248/linkexchange.com/>

~~~
swombat
_The Internet Link Exchange (ILE) is a free public service designed to help
web sites advertise each other. The concept is simple: by joining, you agree
to display advertising banners for other members, and they agree to display
banners for you. You can decide what type of sites to advertise on and
advertise for so you don't need to worry about inappropriate material showing
up on your pages._

Big difference - this one only does the exchange between groups that agree to
exchange with each other, which removes a lot of the trust issues that
linkexchange and its other variants used to have.

~~~
KevinMS
You don't think that defunct link exchange probably had that feature, or that
there were a thousand variations of that at the time?

Its fine, but don't claim is revolutionary like its claimed on the blog post
the idea was taken from. Its part of a category of web sites that even has a
wikipedia entry <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_exchange>

Maybe its a good plan, I think linkexchange was bought by microsoft, which
then killed it.

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RobGR
Some follow up thoughts:

1) potential users need to be able see the all groups, and what ads are in the
groups, to figure out where they belong

2) Is there a need for private groups at all ?

3) In your faq you mention the startup problem -- everyone starts with 0
points, so they can't show their ads, and no one can get points because their
are no ads to show. If you see all the groups and ads in a group, you will get
some clicks just coming through people examining that page, and you can assign
those credits and get things started that way.

4) I think you need to allow one account to be in multiple groups

That's all, I hope your project takes off.

Is there any way to make money from this at all ? Other than have another
money-making site that is promoted via admates, of course.

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RobGR
I would use something like this.

But I went to the various sites listed in the faq as showing ads, and I wasn't
impressed -- the ads sucked. For example, on
<http://www.clarkwood.com/extras/> , after searching the whole page and
looking at my adblock settings to see it was blocked, I finally realized the
picture of a wrench and the text "software you might enjoy" was the ad.

I might sign up for this anyway, but my web sites already suffer from poor,
cluttered design with too much text, and I'll have to block ads that don't
make it obvious that they are ads, and why you should or shouldn't click on
them.

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wheels
I like the idea ... I think. Here's some feedback:

\- Sign up forms must die. I'd have registered if I could view a list of
companies that was there and was moderately interested. As was, I ended up
just closing the window.

\- Blog exchange would be more interesting for me. I don't want to display ads
on our site, but I have no problem writing about a startup that I find
genuinely cool, especially if the interest goes both ways.

\- You're going to have to ride a tough line between this struggling to be
relevant and exploding into a steaming pile of crap. Maybe link it to
something like a requirement to have a Crunchbase entry?

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rksprst
I recently launched a direct competitor to you: <http://adexchanged.com/>
We've had 205194 ad impressions served in the 28 days since we've launched.
I'd be interested if you wanted to share some of your numbers...

The fact that competitors spring up proves that there's a market there...
right? Isn't that how web 2.0 works ;)

We're going to launch some major new features and improvements next week
(hopefully putting google analytics and google adsense out of business ;).

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swombat
That's kind of cool. Could use more exposure.

The groups are a nice solution to the problem of trust on ad exchanges.

