wanderingstan

We have seen the rise of vertical search engines (e.g. WebMD). I’ve explained that Lijit turns each person into a vertical search engine based on trusted social connections.

But what about advertisements?

For most internet sites, you put AdSense on your site and hope the checks start coming. But you have basically zero control over what appears.

I had coffee on Monday with Matt Gerson of eConscious, who told me the story of this article about the dangers of teflon. When they had AdSense, it would show ads for teflon products. An article about why teflon is bad, and it shows advertisements for teflon products. The readers were understandably confused. AdSense isn’t there any more.

On the one hand, this violates the ethical standards of the site. On the other hand, this is very poor targeting! Everyone loses: the network gets no money, the publisher wasted valuable space, and the reader is distracted and confused.

Thus the rise of vertical ad networks like GreenAdWorks.

But what I really want is an Ad network that works like Lijit does for searches. I want a network that won’t show ads for products or companies that have been rated poorly by people that I trust, people in my social networks. I want an ad network that hilites products and companies that have been positively rated by people that I trust.

So if someone is reading a post on this blog about startups, I want to show an ad for a book about startup’s rated highly by Todd on Amazon.

This network doesn’t exist. I hope someday it does.

See also:
Social Media and Advertising

It used to be that there were and handful of media outlets. We the poor masses were expected passively ingest their content. Our only “interaction” was to choose which media source to turn our attention to. Tonight is it NBC or CBS or ABC?

Part of their output streams came from advertisers. We were also expected to passively ingest these parts.

But now there’s been a change, right? Web 2.0 and all that user generated content stuff. But so far it’s only been in the first part, the content. what about the ads? We’re still expected to pay attention to any old crap that “they” want us to see or hear. (Or smell, in the case of many magazines!)

Google innovated by giving us more targeted but less annoying ads, but we still have no say in the matter.

Fred’s post today about favoriting ads got me thinking about it again. David Henderson and I talked about this when Digg ran a story on Digging Advertisements.

We now have ads created by users, which is a good start. But if we’re going to have this stuff in our face, we need have more choice about what’s going to be there.

I’m not sure what this will look like. I’m sure in will involve the phenomena of people endorsing ads, like when they friend the XBox user in MySpace. (As first pointed out to me.)