Adnetwork suggestion

[schlottke]

I wonder if selecting a catagory for each link addition (sports, music, health, etc) would be a better idea, since it appears that content related links are far better than non-related ones.

Any opinions?

[digitalpoint]

Already planned for the future (when there are enough sites to make it feasible).

[Foxy]

That is the problem that we see at the moment is that we get Teenchat ads appearing on food sites - the last thing we need!

So a filtered system would be good and would assist us in rolling it out further

[bresso]

I agree. Let's all hope that many new sites sign up, fill up many categories and allow Shawn to launch this feature.

[bresso]

It'd be great if your own Coop links did not show up on your own site too...

[schlottke]

Bresso.com - are you the owner of this site from about 5 years ago or so???

[bresso]

Yes, why? :)

[john_loch]

Shawn

Are there enough sites yet to accommodate categories ?

Perhaps ppl could select an individual category to which thier site belongs, then a set of target categories they'd like to appear in.

I've been hearing chatter recently about auth/hub sites losing rank because unthemed IBL's start outweighing themed IBLs. Apparently more pronounced with G's most recent activity.

It's just the 'chatter' is a little too frequent to ignore and it worries me a touch. I'm also hearing PR is now augmented in a similar fashion where IBL's are all pointing to the same page (except where varying anchors/URL's are pointing to internal pages etc - your network fits well there) :)

How are the plans ?

Cheers,

JL.

[thebassman]

Yeah, I think this is a great idea... I look forward to seeing it implimented when we have enough members. :D

[schlottke]

I think there are around 800 now? I suggest that each link be allowed to join a specific category.

[Foxy]

If it is possible this would be good - as I said earlier we have a real problem with chat rooms on our food sites - it is the last thing we need - as it is our natural food and good image that we wish to portray - I have left the ads up for the moment as the volume where it is is small - but as we develop these sites we need to exclude "problems" for us.

[exam]

Well, lets get busy and refer lots of people to the ad-network, so Shawn can go ahead with the plans for categories. :)

[chachi]

If there are 200 sites in the network, I don't think that is nearly enough to split up into categories. I would much rather have links on 200 unrelated websites than links on 5 or 10 sites.

[schlottke]

I think its over 800, atleast thats how many link ids are out there... so I'd assume there are atleast 1500 sites?

[thebassman]

No, because each site could be promoting 5,10, 50, 100 different sites.

[lowrider14044]

I'm sure that themed links would be better then non-themed but how much? The reason I ask is from what I gather from the sleeping bag thread/test being done over in the "All Other Tools" forum has done rather well with few if any links being what would be considered themed. Maybe I'm missing something though. I didn't read all 1278 posts in the thread.

I'm not real fond of some of the ads that show up on my site either just as I'm sure some are not happy with mine because of the type of site it is but I'd much rather have the potential of it being picked up and counted from 800 or however many sites are in the network rather then just a few. Just MHO :)

[Help Desk]

Yeah, I think this is a great idea... I look forward to seeing it implimented when we have enough members. :D
It such a good Idea I'm suprised nobody has thought of it before. Thanks for using the cliche "Thinking out of the box".

Now that enough for praise, get to work!

[schlottke]

No, because each site could be promoting 5,10, 50, 100 different sites.


Many of the sites are very small, with very low weights- Im assuming a large number of the sites are only promoting one category.

[thebassman]

But there are a good number of sites with decent weight... I'm not sure if my weight would be considered good, but I have 6 different ads running, and I'm sure they all get decent weight.

[schlottke]

How many different categories would the ads fall into? Are they all different topics? I'm running about 8 different categories, but Im looking at the ads and not seeing a whole lot of adversity yet. Shawn's Financial related ads (WU), Sports, and Game related at the moment.

I'm assuming when this is created, it will not be narrowed down (for example) by specific Sport or Hobby like DMOZ is, rather to "Sports" and "Hobbies".

-- Shawn, any stats on this stuff?

[digitalpoint]

I don't have any stats because I don't keep track of the individual ads.

But my thoughts right now are that making categories would end up being a bad thing, because to make it "fair", the account would need to be categorized rather than the ads (because of the weighting system). What this would end up doing is instead of having one large network, you would have a bunch of isolated themed only networks. Since if you choose to display ads of a certain type, then your ads would only show on sites with that same theme.

[schlottke]

Good point- I like the broad approach better. I suppose people within the ad network may want to plan for that when choosing where to link, rather than the other way around.

[john_loch]

I thought maybe something along these lines;
-------
You give your account a category.
Each account already has x total weight.

You can assign a % of x total weight to your ad.
You assign a category to your ad.

Finally, you bias what your acct (site) will show on topic.
ie 70% category only. (leaving 30% for off theme ads)
--------

The aggregate biased weight of each category is displayed, minus your own weight(ie, the total of (biased acct weights) in your category except yours), so new participants can see how much maximum weight they can assign (obviously no more than 50% or less of the total).

It is in some ways similar to the standard categorised click exchange scenario (except the actual weightings are generated from clickthrus in those cases).

What do you think ?

Cheers,

JL

[thebassman]

I like it... well thought out JL! :D

[Foxy]

At first read I would agree - not a bad idea at all

Maybe, also, the answer could be that we have the right to exclude certain types of categories within what JL has proposed.

In other words we approach the issue from what we do not want.:)

[lowrider14044]

Being the peon and new guy here I'll try to be careful what I say. :) It seems that trying to categorize sites and ads on a network of this size isn't very practical. It also would seem to make a simple straight forward system much more complicated. I've gone to some of the sites carrying ads and the ones I've seen in many cases opt to use text only ads with a font size of 1 placed either at the bottom of the page or someplace non-obtrusive. I would guess that in many cases normal visitors never even notice or see them. So basically my novice, not know what I'm talking about thought :) would be to leave things as they are. If it's not broken don't fix it. At least not until you have a few thousand more sites or so signed up.

[Foxy]

lowrider140444 - This is a very good comment and well respected.

Where I am coming from is that I really like the simplicity of the system, and you should not meddle with these sort of things that are working - however for us, we have this problem of compatibility, and I am looking for a solution. By talking about it here the idea may emerge as to how.

That solution will enable us to use it more

[lowrider14044]

I know this is a big no no by SEO standards but what about a small layer that was non visible? After all, I think the main intent of the network is backlinks rather then ttraffic and I know non-visible stuff gets spidered because for my keywords the #1 site in most cases is a really nice looking home page with almost no text but when I spidered their page I came up with nothing but a page full of spam text. Does anyone know for sure what if any sort of penalty G might impose? The site I mentioned above may use other methods to achieve what they have rather then a hidden layer? I have no idea since I'm not a professional web designer or programer.

[lowrider14044]

I just made a test page with one hidden frame and loaded it to my server and spidered the page. It spidered the page just fine. Now the question would be if this would solve your problem? Would Shawn have any objections? And how ticked off would "G" get?

[digitalpoint]

Uhm... the intention of the ad network is NOT to hide the ads. If I run across sites doing it (cloaking, invisible <div>, 1pt fonts, hidden behind layers, etc.) those sites will be dropped from the network.

It's an ad network, not a spam network. :)

[Foxy]

I was just watching our news and an article appeared about knives being sold by mail order and how no checks were being made etc.

The knives were obviously for uses that were not in the kitchen or other places where you would use knives normally

My wife said "those are the sort of knives that are being advertised on our sites"

Eh?

Weapons?

I am out of here until it is sorted - I will not advertise for one second anything like this.

[lowrider14044]

Well that solves that. :) Just trying to think of something that would solve Foxy's problem and possible allow her to put ads on all her pages without worrying about it. FWIW...I have 5 display size ads on all my pages. I ain't trying to hide nuttin. :)

[Nitin M]

Not sure how big a "problem" this really is ... for me it is a non-issue right now.


But, had a thought on what I think would be a low level-of-effort enhancement that might be worth considering ...

What if each user could define a certain number of domains to filter ... like 10 or 20 or so and when the ad network gets a request for an ad it will not return any ad from a domain on that site's filter list.

It isn't perfect, but I think in terms of implementation probably not too difficult.

Would allow a site owner at least some control to omit ads they see on their site that they find highly objectionable.

... just an idea ...

[digitalpoint]

Yeah, it's been discussed a little bit... the difficult part is dropping the person's weight accordingly based on the weight of the sites they don't want to run ads for.

[lowrider14044]

That seems feasible but what if a large percentage of the network decided that a particular ad or site was objectionable? Where would that leave them? Especially if they objected to no one? To me the responsibility of deciding what is/is not objectionable gets stuck on Shawn. Which he appears to do a pretty good job at. :)

One part of the network I don't fully understand is being allowed to join and be ranked based on one website but point ads to another. I know Shawn or someone has to approve all ads and I assume this includes the content of the site it's pointed to but this seems like a lot of checking to do. And as the network grows the burden will increase.

Another thought, and this may already be available but I don't know where it is, would be a listing of member sites and url's ads point to. This might be helpful? If nothing else it might serve to let prespective members make a decision if they want to join the network or not before joining?

Just some off the top of the head thoughts.

[Foxy]

Well that solves that. :) Just trying to think of something that would solve Foxy's problem and possible allow her to put ads on all her pages without worrying about it. FWIW...I have 5 display size ads on all my pages. I ain't trying to hide nuttin. :)

Her? lol! Hey I'm 280pds+ with 1 lovely wife and numeorus ex others in legal and un-legal format. Kids? ahh...another time!

Appreciate the thoughts :)

The problem here is that some sites are "non-specific" in that they are on the side lines of direct product image, and then there are the sites who are directly connected and rather sensitive to that which is shown, which is where we are.

That is why I keep asking for the "solution" but ......

That's fine by me :)

[lowrider14044]

I noticed that after the "my wife" in your previous post. Was going to apologize but thought I'd wait to see if you caught it. :) Guess I'm just a male chauvinist. :) Actually I'm not but for some reason the name or word Foxy puts visions of ladies in my head. Guess I spent too many hours listening to Jimmy Hendrix and Foxy Lady when I was young? :)

[Foxy]

LOL - I used to be [sort of still am] foxyweb but I found that too many people had hijacked the name using it for a variety of uses some of which involved porn.

So I decided to change it to z+2 [another reason] and found that the members here didn't want that so I just picked up on what people called me here anyway, which is "Foxy".

Now as for JH and Foxy Lady ah....:)

[lowrider14044]

What can I say.....This was a strange place back in the 60's and 70's. Still is really unfortunately. Actually got to hear Hendrix at Woodstock. :)

[flawebworks]

I distinctly recall referring to certain males as Foxy in the 70s. Didn't apply just to females.

[dazzlindonna]

How about this for a suggestion? Until the network grows, how about just two categories...one for kid-friendly, and one for everything else. I'm not sure if that is the best way to describe the categories, but basically, some sort of judgement where those sites that no one would likely object to would fit into one category, and all other sites would go into the other category. Then publishers choose if they want one, the other, or both to be shown on their sites.

[wwwbug]

That is the problem that we see at the moment is that we get Teenchat ads appearing on food sites - the last thing we need!

So a filtered system would be good and would assist us in rolling it out further
i agree with you ,i think if we can't lead our client to the right place ,they may be not will,and it must waste our resources,and it must be not efective