

Ask HN: I wrote this, what now? - nl

Over the past few months I've been experimenting with affiliate marketing on a blog I run. To my surprise it has been moderately successful.<p>Being more a software person than a writer, I wrote my own contextual ad delivery system, using affiliate ads for inventory.<p>Last week, Google rolled out a very similar feature for AdWords [1], claiming it "leads to more clicks, higher quality leads, and higher ROI for your search ads".<p>Encouraged by that I built a technology demonstrator for my ad delivery technology: http://demo.qontex.com/<p>Based on my experiments, the contextual technology works roughly as well as Google AdSense does (I do have an advantage in that I don't need to worry about click-fraud).<p>Here's a few samples, based on the top HN stories when I submitted this:<p>http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother<p>http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://stacksmashing.net/2010/11/15/cracking-in-the-cloud-amazons-new-ec2-gpu-instances/<p>http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/post/1583250140/facebook-messaging-scorned-by-nerds-built-for&#38;categories=Books<p>I'd love some suggestions for what I should do with this? Should I try and licence the technology (to who?) or should I try marketing it to webmasters (and how would the finances work there? It seems odd to charge a website to run ads on it)? Or maybe I should be paying people to run my ads on their site?<p>[1] http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/11/product-listing-ads-rolling-out-to-all.html
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ig1
I had actually planned a startup building something similar (+ip geolocation
to pick appropriate affiliate links), however I ended up moving onto another
idea because I couldn't make the numbers work out.

To make the same amount of money as from CPC ads, you have to get a much
higher click-through rate than CPC ads conventionally get. I wasn't convinced
I could build contextual ad technology that would result in the higher CTR to
make it worthwhile. Congrats if you've managing to pull that off, I'd be
interested to hear what the equivalent CPC/CPM would be of your ads.

My own business plan was to target sites which can't use Google Adwords,
primarily sites which require logins to access content (dating sites, small
social networks) or do dynamic page generation.

Another good market might be blogs which don't monetize very well at the
moment if your tech works well in that context. I believe jgc posted a while
back saying despite his high traffic on his blog he couldn't see traditional
adwords bringing in much.

My plan to monetize initially was to take a percentage cut, use your affiliate
code 20% of the time and the websites affiliate code the other 80% of the
time. That way you avoid having to handle the payments yourself but get income
very early on.

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nl
For some niche markets affiliates work pretty well.

I don't think I'm allowed to share Adsense numbers, but from the one (mildly)
successful blog I make money on I get around 30 times as much money from
affilates compared to Adsense.

(and yes, it's becoming clear I'll need to do the geo-location based filtering
of ads)

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ig1
Let me make some ballpark guesses here: Adsense for blogs normally comes to
around $0.10 - $1.10 CPM, so I assume your making it the region of $3 - $30.

If your affiliate ads are generating > $10 / CPM then you're home dry, your
product will sell yourself. Less than $10 then you'll probably find it hard to
compete against the major blog ad networks, however small-to-midtier blogs
that use adsense may well be a good target market for you.

~~~
nl
Your assumptions are valid.

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notahacker
If you're marketing to webmasters, maybe a Skimlinks style model where you
manage all the affiliate programs etc on behalf of the end user and pay them a
cut of the revenues generated from their site?

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nl
I'd never seen Skimlinks. Have you used it before?

Looking at it now that looks to be quite an interesting model.

They claim " _you can earn up to 110% of what you would have earned if you
managed your affiliate links programme yourself._ " which sounds doubtful at
first. Thinking about it though, most affiliate programs increase your
commission as you sell more, so it's possible this could work out.

~~~
notahacker
Haven't used it _yet_.

I'm guessing that that economies of scale and quality control over their
publishers they can potentially negotiate larger-than-normal commission
arrangements with some providers, and they only need to take a small
percentage to be profitable.

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gregpilling
How about an openx style business model? or try to get some feedback from the
affiliate marketers at WebmasterWorld.com and see what they think.

~~~
nl
OpenX has an interesting model and it could work for me. I haven't been able
to work out how much OpenX actually costs, though.
<http://www.openx.org/publisher/compare-ad-server-products> says they charge
"for overage impressions" (whatever that means) or "based on impression
volumes".

The obvious question is _how much_ per impression because thats the difference
between this being viable and not.

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nl
Clickable: <http://demo.qontex.com/>

[http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://www.thestar.com/news/worl...](http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199
---israelification-high-security-little-bother)

