

YC Startup Adpinions Launches - sharpshoot
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/25/adpinions-vote-for-the-ads-you-want/

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far33d
As I replied on the techcrunch post, here's a quote from the recent film
Ratatouille, that I believe sums up my opinion on the numerous haters out
there (uncov, jay (living in first life) and the rest)

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a
position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment.
We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the
bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the
average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it
so."

~~~
hello_moto
What about those MS haters?

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far33d
Basic premise holds - creating > criticism.

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mynameishere
It's obviously a huge, huge market, but I just have to greet this with some
skepticism: "Adpinion's solution is to empower users to choose their
advertisers.". I think...people who are cognizant of ads in any way other than
background noise usually "choose" to get rid of them. But then, maybe there is
a good PsyOps way around ad blockers. There are other companies doing similar
things, like adkrakr. I tried that today out of curiosity...it brings up a tag
cloud, and I clicked on (among other things) "bird seed". What do you know...I
got some bird seed ads. Wow.

But hey, if you can increase CTRs by 0.01 percent, you'll be billionaires.

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avehn
Ads are here to stay and if you have to encounter them, why not let them be
ones for things you might actually like? I think the voting thing is pretty
ingeneous, though i feel there will be some problems:

People don't like extra effort, they are more likely to ignore an ad they
don't like than click or move a slider. On the other side of the same coin,
they will be more likely to just click on an ad they do like than muck with
some sort of rating system.

People don't always know what they like, just because one day they find
something attractive doesn't mean a week later or even hours later they will
like the same thing.

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rkabir
Not sure how they can do this - but seems like there are a few things that
would really help this work.

a - encourage the advertisers to make better ads. Ads are inherently useful -
when they're relevant. Cool ads are entertainment in themselves. Anyone
remember adcritic.com? Welcome to my Friday nights in college...

b - pass voting data back to the advertisers in some meaningful way. Haven't
thought this through yet...

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shiro
> encourage the advertisers to make better ads.

That's what I wish to happen. I do sometimes enjoy ads themselves. If
advertisers find it's more effective to make nicer ads than to put crappy ads
everywhere...

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nickb
Good article, nasty comments :( TC has become a very negative place.

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SwellJoe
Looks cool! I'm eager to give it a try. Maybe we'll get the YC alumni discount
(or maybe just priority on the invites).

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myoung8
are you guys planning on letting people actually input their ad preferences?
or are you just going to determine them based on what they vote on?

i wrote this in another thread, but i would gladly spend a few minutes telling
an ad-server what i'm interested in so that the ads are relevant.

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zach
If it's reddit for ads, then I'd think it's based on what you vote on. The
process seems to work well enough that you shouldn't get too many ads for Ron
Paul's site.

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danielha
I got a chuckle out of that one.

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mdolon
I had thought of this exact same system last week, but obviously a little too
late. :) Good luck guys!

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gibsonf1
I voted up the ad with desktop to S3 storage :)

