Hello everyone! My name is David Parkinson, and I just quit my full-time job at Microsoft to be an entrepreneur and work full-time on emptyspaceads a new ad format that lets you turn your website's empty space into cash. The idea with emptyspaceads is that your site's empty space isn't providing you any value beyond simple aesthetics. Firstly, the ads only appear when when your user's mouse is in the empty space of your site, and they only appear within your site's empty space. So for some users, they'll never see the ads. I just launched officially a couple week ago, so I'm really looking for honestly brutal feedback that helps me improve this product to make you folks happy. company blog posts) tend to get ignored by users because they learn to ignore standard ad formats and placements. Finally, you can have your cake and eat it too by letting you keep all of your existing ad units, as well as website design. Oh and our first users are reporting nearly 10X the CTR of AdSense. You can create your own TextAds, ImageAds, or even HTMLAds. These allow you to drive users to content that you monetize well (a CafePress store for example), or behavior you'd like to encourage (like more RSS subscribers). (See our blog for an example how we use emptyspaceads to get more RSS subscribers to our blog by embedding the feedburner chicklet). Or our Sample TextAd, ImageAd, or NetworkAd... or check out our demo. I know this product isn't perfect, but I want to improve it, and I'd love your help in letting me know what it is you'd like to see from us. I want to make it as useful as possible to publishers like you. For affiliate programs specifically, you can create ads that link off to your target product site (such as a ClickBank HopLink) or a landing page. But I'd also be interested in learning which ad networks / affiliate programs you folks would like to see using this... so I know who to talk to (so we can expand our current selection of networks moreso than ShoppingAds)
adbrite offers the option to let the publisher use a 3rd party ad, if the one adbrite provides doesn't perform as expected. Do you offer that same option.
I will try this once you get plenty of advertisers. I see this site is quite new and your template looks not better than adbrite.
So I think what you're speaking of is the fall back that AdBrite does with Google AdSense... where they try to serve an ad and if they can't, they serve and AdSense ad. Since we can't serve Google AdSense ads (yet ) we wouldn't currently offer this. However, we do allow you to create your own ads that can appear if there are no 3rd party ad network ads. These can link anywhere you like... You can use them to help sell affiliate products, direct users to profitable pages on your site, or even use it to gain RSS subscribers as we do on http://blog.emptyspaceads.com Please keep the questions coming! -David
Thanks very much. Can I ask you where you would recommend to advertise? I'm a bit new to online marketing and would love to get thoughts on this. My first approach is to find all the blogs who talked about ShoppingAds and comment on them... then post on forums.... then find big sites already using ShoppingAds and get them to add emptyspaceads. Maybe I'm missing something big?
David, just a word of warning. I had a look at your blog and found your post about v7n. If you carry on like that here you'll end up banned too. You have 1 product - there's no need to post two duplicate posts in different categories. That's my 2 cents spent for today
Point well taken, and thanks for the feedback! I don't want to break any rules... What happens when you feel your product applies to several categories?
You say "I wasn't sure if this was suitable for category X or category Y, but I opted for X. Mods, if necessary please move this to Y" - something to that effect. Many resources are wasted by duplicate posts. As an ex-employee of Microsoft..just how much did you get paid there? In the region of $0-99k or $100k+ per annum? Cheers
Ok, I'll definitely do that in the future. And mods feel free to move or combine my posts as I wasn't sure exactly where to post (because I felt they made sense). As to compensation, my recruiter would hit me if I talked about compensation.... but they pay very well, and the offer you get right out of college here in the US... is on the high end of the offers you'll get.