
Ask YCN: Contextual Ads on a Personalized Dynamic Site/App? - joshwa

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joshwa
As I'm exploring advertising solutions, I've discovered that most ad networks
aren't really appropriate for a site that hides most content behind a
registration or is highly personalized, like a social web app.

This is because most ad networks (AdSense, YPN, AdBrite) rely on spidering
your content to do their targeting... and they don't log in to your site to do
it. If they can't get into your site to see the content, they can only show
run-of-network ads, or ads based on what you tell them explicitly about your
users _in general_.

Is there a product out there that is more suited towards showing targeted ads
based on protected page content? Or passing keywords as parameters to the ad
script?

There are definitely privacy issues here, but I thought I'd ask here to see if
anyone knew of a way to show my users relevant ads, and not just "hey I think
you're a 20-something with lots of disposable income" ads...

Maybe I have to do another startup just to serve this market?

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dannymo2
With adbrite, you can target specific keywords for them to target their ads
towards, instead of having them spider...You should also be able to do the
same with YPN...

Dan DormItem

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joshwa
But can you do this at runtime via parameters?

I know I can set site-wide keywords, or section-targeted keywords on most ad
sites, but that doesn't help when much of the content is user-generated AND
non-spiderable...

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staunch
Markus Frind posted this on his blog a short while ago:
<http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/custom-channels/>

It sounds like you can at least split things up by age.

~~~
joshwa
I'm actually quite curious about how he's accomplishing this... my best guess
is that he's using the demographic info to redirect each age group to a
different URL, e.g. 18-25 goes to pof.com/a/, 26-45 goes to pof.com/b/, and
45+ goes to pof.com/c/.

I was hoping though, that if my users are talking about cars, they get car
ads. (or, even better, mesothelioma!)

