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by blumkvist 4530 days ago
Delivering ads from the same domain is impossible for small publishers. If you insist on using your own adserve, that means your numbers will decide the billing, whic leaves the possibility for fraud, which is unacceptable to the advertiser. Then you have the problem eith actually finding advertisers. A smal site can't dedicate resources for ad selling and relies heavily on networks for monetization.
1 comments
oneeyedpigeon 4529 days ago
> your numbers will decide the billing

Only if the model is payment-per-view as opposed to payment-per-click, or commission on referral sales

> then you have the problem [w]ith actually finding advertisers

Isn't there the same problem with the third-party model, unless you go for a completely automated solution like AdWords? Isn't there an opportunity for a middleman to match up publishers and advertisers? Couldn't an automated system still work on a same-domain basis via advertiser-provided APIs?

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blumkvist 4529 days ago
Clicks are nice and a lot of people focus on them, but it's not a viable option for a lot of publishers/industries. Brand advertisers are about sending messages rather than driving traffic to pages and converting people there. Around 70% of display advertising is not direct response orientated.

The typical adnetworks give you ad tags which you put on your site and the ads are served from their ad servers. Then there are a few companies [1][2][3] that are marketplaces faciiliating transactions between publishers and advertisers, but they still use their own platform to serve the ads. And then larger buyers give them adtags, served by their own servers. Nobody in their right mind will just wire you money for ad inventory and just take your word for the traffic unless you are a very large name and have a proprietery self-serve platform (AOL/yahoo style). And even on these platfroms a lot of advertisers still use their own adtags (a recent java malware attack through yahoo's network comes to mind).

[1] buyads.com [2] buysellads.com [3] blogads.com

PS: sry for typos and formatting, on the phone atm.

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