Over at his site, Jeremy gives Searchblog his opinion on the Feedburner implementation. Elsewhere, I’ve gotten comments on the AdBrite ads running on the right and below the permalink pages.
Jeremy says:
My thoughts on this:
• The ads are irrelevant–unrelated to the content of the post. Unlike AdSense, they don’t fit in with the context at all.
• The ads are pretty big.
• That space is not well used. Instead of Amazon.com branding, why not show an album cover there? That might get me interested. Maybe.
I have to agree, as does Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner. But I think this issue will be solved shortly, in a matter of months. There will be more choices and more flexibility in RSS advertising, and I sense that given Yahoo’s deep interest in RSS, we will be seeing movement from the big guys soon. Amazon may never solve the contextual problem for sites like mine, which are not really focused on products, but that’s most likely a problem not worth solving.
In any case, when I have a moment, I’ll turn off the Amazon ads. I’ll try more stuff in RSS when it comes available.
As for the AdBrite system, I agree that the ads which show up on my site are mostly crap. A few of them, however, have been endemic or nearly endemic, and that’s because someone made the decision to actually buy an ad, as opposed to the network stuff that runs most of the time. Problem: when someone buys an ad, they look just like the network ads, which is not good – an endemic sponsor should look endemic! I’ll be working on that with the AdBrite folks. Generally, they have a way to go yet. More to come as the experiment continues…
For now, you might be better off manually picking a few relevant books at Amazon and listing them on your site with associate tags.
It’d be great if this could be done automatically for both websites and RSS feeds, but the targeted advertising engines out there aren’t quite there yet. I think you’re right that it’s just a matter of time until someone gets this right. Maybe we’ll even offer a product in this space sooner or later.
the feature i really wish that adbrite had was the ability to put up multiple internal/psa/free ads. i’m trying out adbrite on blo.gs, and quickly realized the network-wide ads were not worth it. it would be nice to at least be able to fill up the space with public-service ads or just free ads (or amazon affiliate links!) to generate some useful clickthrough numbers.
If you want auto-contextualized Amazon links, you could try Alexa’s quicklinks: http://pages.alexa.com/associates/quicklinks.html
I just tried it using your URL and got several books including “Web Search Garage”, “Google Hacks” and others.
Give it a shot.