A new way of bringing in endemic advertising, which is naturally site specific. This marks a new approach for Google, and an extension of its site targeting feature. I am trying to get some details on what Google believes is competitive, as this is clearly not something professional publishers with their own sales forces are going to react to well. The idea of a link “Advertise on this site” going to anyone other than the publisher is, well, controversial. But for smaller authors, it’s outsourced ad sales, and they will love it. Folks like BlogAds, FM, and others will have to prove their merit even more now.
More when I have it.
When I first saw the title of this post (just after hearing John on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, actually), I read it as Advertise This Site.
This reminded of something I used to do when I ran a short lived (you’ll see why…;-) counterculture fanzine (a photocopied affair), which was to approach people who had adverts I liked and offer them a free slot or two, or a slot for something in kind (a free record sample or two, for example).
I was more driven to fill space, and create an identity for the fanzine, than generate income, at least in the early issues. (It never got past the early issues, actually!). And at the time, a small amount of good advertising copy doubled as good copy, period.
So – assuming that website owners have a reasonable understanding of the sorts of people who visit their site, it’s possible they have a good idea of the ads that will appeal to readers and possibly enhance the site through relevant advertising content…
And how to achieve this? Well, if I visit a site that has relevance to my site, a quick click on my Google toolbar ‘Advertise this site’ button would notify Google that if the company has an advertising deal with them, I’d quite like copies of the ads on my site (which I’d have registered with Google).
Not only do I get advertising content I think may add value to my site, Google gets additional info about where to target ads, and also gets free leads generated for potential new advertisers.
There is scope for all sorts abuse of course, but for small website owners who possibly want ads to add free changing pseudo-content to their site, and who may also want to be able to tune that advertising to a certain extent, over and above using the wonders of Google’s relevance ranking algorithms, this may be an interesting way forwards…
…they may of course do this already (I haven;t followed web advertising technologies much at all, to date…)
PS I used the Jacuba Spellcheck bookmarklet for the first time on this comment, so hopefully there are fewer typos than is normally the case for me…
The one drawback of the early implementation seems to be that if you use one Adsense account for multiple sites, you must upsell avertising for one of your sites across all your sites. There’s no way at this point to limit the “Avertise on this site” links to a single channel.