Co-Op Advertising Network History

The way I learn, is simply by doing and experimenting. The ad network really has been another one of my coding exercises to see if I can do something better, and learn in the process. In fact, I've already learned some valuable lessons which are now filed away in my mind for use on "real" things like our commercial products. The ad network has already gone through a couple revisions because of this to take into account some new things I learned during the process:

• Server-side caching (I don't have the server resources to serve up a live ad for every page view for every site on the network)
• File locking (very high load sites were having a problem with the file cache because initally it had no file locking)
• Web server keep alives (this can take a web server down really quickly if clients are requesting a single file [for example the ad being served by the ad server], and it's under high load)
• Manipulating large amounts of data quickly (I can parse a 2GB log for ad impressions [~40M impressions] in less than 30 seconds [parsing, compiling and inserting data into appropriate database]... seems pretty fast to me. heh)

I don't think anyone can argue that the best advertising system out there is Google AdSense. The ability to serve up ads based on the context of the page it's on (with the same JavaScript code) is nothing short of amazing. One minor issue it does have is that some people have JavaScript disabled, or they have firewalls or Internet security software running that blocks AdSense ads from being displayed. This has actually been a long standing issue for me. In fact, there are many threads in my forum about it (some exampes here, here, here, etc.)

Then I started noticing that big advertisers using Overture and even Google Ads did not have this problem because they are not done with JavaScipt. Instead, the ads are imbeded into the HTML source by server-side processing. If you search any search engine for anything, the text ads are all embeded directly withn the HTML source. So they must be having the same thoughts I'm having (that serving via JavaScript might be easy for setup, but not the ideal way to do it). You can see this in any search on any major search engine. Here are some examples from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The ads being displayed are within the HTML source, not served by JavaScript or an IFRAME tag.

Since I don't have near the resources needed to work out a contextual advertising system, let's outline what I would want as an advertiser and also a member of such a network:

• It must be FREE
• Must not use technologies that can be disabled on the client (frames or JavaScript)
• Shouldn't be able to be disabled by things like Norton Utilities or similar client-side products
• It's a co-op, so it should be based on the number of pages someone runs ads on, not impressions (impressions, clicks, etc. can be spoofed)
• Someone could generate a ton of orphaned pages to run ads on, so lets base it on the number of pages that a major search engine knows about (currently Google). Google does a good job of filtering out spam and duplicate content pages, so that's another advantage.
• Set some sort of upper cap on the number of pages within a site so someone doesn't generate a million pages and take a large percentage of the network
• Give people an incentive to help the ad network grow (give them something to refer people)

After many hours of coding and testing, the ad network has now taken on a life of it's own. Lots of people like it and they tell people, which then tell people. That's the best form of advertising you can have. I need to move the backend to some beefier hardware, so hopefully that will happen before too long (there is a fund raiser for that if you want to help).

Does it work?

I can also say for certainty that the very first sale from one of my new sites came from a user clicking on an ad on the ad network. So the people clicking ads are not necessarily ad network site owners.