How do you gain traction in that, though? There seems like a huge barrier to entry. I don't suppose adbrite or google like hiring college dropout python hackers, do they? :(
Something I'd love to see in ads is the ability to give feedback on them.
I like advertisements. One of the things I'll do if there is a new industry that I want to learn about is pickup trade magazines and read all of the ads. My brain has gotten good at filtering out the marketing fluff, so the ads end up being a good piece of information to use.
Unfortunately, online ads seem to be taking a bit of a shotgun approach. I'm never, ever going to be buying weightloss pills online, and I wish there was a way of letting content creators know this.
I'm also never, ever going to buy anything with a talking ad, or a popover ad.
But little boxes with a picture and some text? I'll look at those all day. There is still an ad I saw on slashdot 4-5 years ago that I remember, and have actually tried to find again because the information on it was valuable to me.
It said something along the lines of "colo that box under your desk". It was clever, because I had a box under my desk, and I would have liked to have colo'd it.
If I could see ads for stuff like that all day, I'd probably buy things from them.
If I'm completely honest, I'd probably even willfully give an ad network information about myself so that they could serve me more relevant ads. Make the relationship a mutually beneficial one.
I live in Phoenix. There are a number of bars that I go to pretty frequently, and there are a number of areas of the city that I like going to. Tell me about concerts happening in those areas, or drink specials at those bars.
There are certain genres of movies that I like, tell me when they're coming out, and take me to a place where I can buy tickets to them.
I like DIY electronics stuff. If sparkfun is having some EL wire on sale, I'd love to know about it.
Advertising is a fun problem space to work in. Huge amounts of traffic and data to process. Doing user prediction. All sorts of neat stuff. There are also a lot of smaller companies out there looking for good developers all the time. Get to know the industry and don't limit yourself to the top 5 and you can get in easy.
Stuff like profiles on users a lot of companies already do we also do stuff like predict based on numerous factors how likely you are to convert on different products. All this without you filling out a form.
Local ads are interesting but more work in selling. As for stuff like weightloss pills the reason you see so much of these is because very few sites can fill their full inventory with relevant paying advertisers so they put whatever they can in the spaces and keep their fingers crossed. The more profiling you do the less likely you are to find relevant advertisers.
One idea that I would like to see in ads is the ability for me to fill out some kind of portable profile that ads could use to figure out what to show me. For example if I'm thinking of buying a car it would be nice to only see car ads for a while. Also the ability to blacklist certain kinds of products. Maybe the end users could decide how much info to divulge that would effect their rates in terms of how many ads are required to pay for content.
How do you gain traction in that, though? There seems like a huge barrier to entry. I don't suppose adbrite or google like hiring college dropout python hackers, do they? :(
Something I'd love to see in ads is the ability to give feedback on them.
I like advertisements. One of the things I'll do if there is a new industry that I want to learn about is pickup trade magazines and read all of the ads. My brain has gotten good at filtering out the marketing fluff, so the ads end up being a good piece of information to use.
Unfortunately, online ads seem to be taking a bit of a shotgun approach. I'm never, ever going to be buying weightloss pills online, and I wish there was a way of letting content creators know this.
I'm also never, ever going to buy anything with a talking ad, or a popover ad.
But little boxes with a picture and some text? I'll look at those all day. There is still an ad I saw on slashdot 4-5 years ago that I remember, and have actually tried to find again because the information on it was valuable to me.
It said something along the lines of "colo that box under your desk". It was clever, because I had a box under my desk, and I would have liked to have colo'd it.
If I could see ads for stuff like that all day, I'd probably buy things from them.
If I'm completely honest, I'd probably even willfully give an ad network information about myself so that they could serve me more relevant ads. Make the relationship a mutually beneficial one.
I live in Phoenix. There are a number of bars that I go to pretty frequently, and there are a number of areas of the city that I like going to. Tell me about concerts happening in those areas, or drink specials at those bars.
There are certain genres of movies that I like, tell me when they're coming out, and take me to a place where I can buy tickets to them.
I like DIY electronics stuff. If sparkfun is having some EL wire on sale, I'd love to know about it.
Pandora for ads, I guess. I'd love that.