Banner Ads Work!

ArsTechnica has an article about a psych study that shows that banner ads really work, even though most people pay almost no attention to them. As it turns out, that doesn't really matter. The experiment indicated that the more a person is exposed to an ad for a product or brand, the more positive feelings they have for it.

I guess that's good news for the advertisers and the sellers, and a good reason to install the AdBlock extension for Firefox so you can block ads for products and brands you don't want to like. Take that, CrazyFrog!

Technorati Tags: advertising, subliminal, subliminal advertising, ArsTechnica

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Will AdBrite's BritePic Change the Way People Share Their Photos?

TechCrunch has a post about AdBrite's new BritePic service, that lets people add extra interactive features to the images they put on their websites. By using a bit of javascript (BritePic creates the code for you, so all you have to do is cut and paste) instead of a regular tag, BritePic let's you add captions, your logo, zoom, and even an RSS feed for the images. And it lets people email the image, link to it, or even embed it in their own website. And since it is AdBrite offering this, of course you can also choose to include little ads, and you still get a share of the revenue even if the ad is clicked after someone else has embedded your image on their site!

Wanna see an example? Well, here's a BritePic I found and embedded here:



It's a shame the ads aren't contextual, but I think it'll be interesting to see if this catches on. With more and more people creating blogs, MySpace pages, and whatever else, I can see two possibilities -- either everybody ends up with some sort of monetized web presence and makes a few extra bucks (maybe enough to pay their ISP bill, or for all the ringtones, music downloads, online game fees, etc.), or all that monetization means there are ads everywhere and everybody ends up ignoring them.

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Technorati Tags: AdBrite, BritePic, revenue sharing, advertising

Amazon Associates Get Context Links

Amazon Associates can now have Context Links on their websites or blogs. Context Links are automatically created, as long as you've added the javascript code that activates them. So when the Context Links Megabrain sees a word or phrase in your content that matches something Amazon wants to sell, it automatically creates a link to that product. And if a visitor hovers over the link, a little mini-window opens up to show them the product. Like this:It's hard to see in that screenshot, but the link is double-underlined. Associates can also use regular underlined links or dashed underline links, and they can customize the colors of the mini-window to fit in with their color scheme. They can also limit the parts of the page where the links can appear. For example, I've only allowed links in the body of each post, not in the sidebar. And no, it won't change your regular links into Amazon links.

I've installed the code, and will wait and see what links the Amazon Contextual Megabrain decides to add to the blog. I haven't decided if I really like the idea or not, but I figure I'll give it a chance.

Tags: Amazon, affiliate marketing, advertising, contextual ads, Context Links, Amazon Associates

Make Money With Contextual Advertising -- and I Don't Mean Adsense!

Another great post at DoshDosh about contextual ad systems that are an alternative to Google Adsense. I've seen most of these on various sites, but I hadn't really put them all together in my head as alternatives (or additions) to Adsense.

Maki links to an article by Michael Pick at Master New Media that offers brief summaries of over a dozen ad companies:

• Yahoo Publisher Network
• Feedburner Ad Network
• Quigo AdSonar
• ValueClick
• Kontera
• IntelliTXT
• Clicksor
• Miva

and a whole bunch more. Head over to that article to read up on all of them.

I've never used any of them, but since Google has asked me not to run Adsense on this blog because of the nature of the content, maybe I'll give one or two of them a try.

NIA Helps You Say No to Tracking Cookies

The Network Advertising Initiative has created an Opt-Out service for people who don't want advertising networks putting tracking cookies on their computers.

Cookies are small text files sent from an internet server and stored on your computer. Advertising companies that have ads on a large number of websites can identify and "track" you as you visit those different sites, and can use that information to serve specific ads for you to view on those sites. Not necessarily a bad thing, but if you have privacy concerns, then it's cool that you can easily opt out and stop them from sending you those cookies.

When I visited the NIA Opt-Out page, it checked the cookies stored on my computer and told me that I had cookies from 5 of their 9 member ad networks. I had cookies from:

• Atlas Solutions
• DoubleClick
• 24/7 RealMedia
• Revenue Science
• Advertising.com

In the report, there was a check-box next to each of their member networks, giving me the option to opt out from receiving cookies from that network in the future. That's cool, even though I did think it was kinda funny that the way they do it is by giving you a new cookie.