22nd November 2005
I started a post about AdGenta yesterday, but ended up talking more about Qumana. AdGenta is a relatively new advertising network, that especially targets blogs, but can technically be used on any site (once you dig around to see how). I’ve surfed around some more on AdGenta.com, and have the following initial thoughts.
AdGenta Does Not Serve Contextual Ads
This means that technically you may be able to serve AdGenta ads side by side with AdSense ads (make your own interpretation of AdSense terms). Despite looking like text based ads, they are actually an image generated dynamically by AdGenta servers based on keywords you provide. The ad code drops in a regular “a” tag with a long href (account name, keywords, ad size, color, etc.)
Weak Sign-up Process
There is no approval process per se. There are 2 email confirmation steps to verify that you are who you type in you are. If this was a contextual based system, I could see this approach. Since the publisher gets to pick their own keywords though, I would have expected an approval process more like a CPM based network. As an advertiser I might be concerned about who was running my keywords on their site.
Qumana is Really Not Necessary
AdGenta hedges on their site that you need Qumana to insert their codes, however one quick run at the advertising banner designer leads you to a page (that you could bookmark), that creates the necessary HTML to drop into any of your posts or pages. You can set color, keywords, size… the whole gamut. It was nice to stumble on to this piece of information as I used Qumana for one afternoon and decided to can it (another post, another day).
So, I am on going to fire up a few AdGenta ads to check on consistency of how timely the ads are served, relevance, and revenue performance. I hope to summarize this data in a few weeks.
21st November 2005
I recently ran across an advertising network that is definitely trying a direct sell to bloggers. AdGenta is a relatively new advertising network that specifically targets bloggers. At first glance, it seems like a good fit with the blog world. After further digging though, it appears that “out of the box”, AdGenta is really only targeted to bloggers using Qumana software.
Qumana bills itself as being for “experienced bloggers who want maximum freedom in their blogging life — the freedom to post to multiple blogs and blog platforms, and the freedom to make money from advertising with no restrictions.” A cursory search of the Internet makes me at least want to try out Qumana. I’ve seen both negative and positive posts about it, which to me means it’s worth at least a look.
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16th November 2005
Well I just got the email today from the Yahoo Publisher Network that you can now run YPN ads in RSS feeds. Google has a similar program running in beta right now, so it was interesting to see YPN make the first move with regards to making this feature active for everyone. I immediately dropped the ads into the BrainSeeds RSS feed. Check out the feed to see it in action.
The current restriction on using these RSS ads (at least as stipulated on their site), is that the feed must be from either a Moveable Type or WordPress feed. That works well for me on this site, but I do run an RSS feed of new recipes on my FoodClassics.com site. I see no issue with adopting their code to meet my needs in that feed, and will be dropping YPN support an email shortly asking if I can incorporate them. My guess is that they may be hesitant given that RSS feed is primarily showing a brief synopsis of new recipes and links to see the full recipe, and does not have much content with which to generate a meaningful contextual ad.
I’ve been reluctant to send YPN many impressions on my sites as I felt that on my initial run with them, the contextual ads were poorly related to my content. Now that they have some experience, I do plan on slowly feeding them more ad impressions.
