TechMeme now has ads. I like the idea of ads running on TechMeme, but it’s too bad the ads run for 30 day blocks. That takes out the smaller advertisers or ads that are intended to be more focused or run for shorter time periods. I do prefer targetted ads over Google’s generic Adsense, however.
Actually, I don’t think most focused sites want to use context-based ads most of the time. In fact, I don’t think the readers want them either. Context-generated ads are OK as fillers, but many times there are focused ads that would fit much better.
There’s a huge opportunity here for Google or someone (Microsoft? Yahoo?) else to step in and help online publishers with managing, selecting, accepting, and receiving payment for their ads. What’s going on here is that for many of the most influential sites, publishers need to either go with generic, context-based ads or build their own ad platform. Sounds simple right? It is kind of. There are advertising platforms that’ll help you get started. However, particularly for the smaller sites, how do they accept payment? This is where all good intentions fall apart. There are two issues here. The smaller sites probably don’t have the ability to accept credit card payments. If the publisher uses a service, such as PayPal, there may be restrictions too on the amount of money that can go through the account. This gets in the way of the publisher as well as the advertiser–particularly if it’s a large company. How does GYM, for instance, purchase an ad on a site? Are they going to use PayPal? Unlikely. They’d break the limit in one day. Are they going to want to spread their credit card information throughout two dozen sites that they want to advertise on? Probably not. They’d probably much prefer buying and managing ads through a major service provided by Google or Microsoft or Yahoo.
What the online publishing world needs is not another Google AdWords/AdSense–it needs simple ad management from a trusted site.