Putting Ads On Others' Ads
from the this-is-going-to-get-complicated... dept
A few different sites today are talking about a new service, called Oodle, that lets people do a meta-search for classifieds in specific locations. In other words, you choose the city you live in (they don’t offer many yet), and you do a search for “bicycle” and you’ll get ads from Craigslist, eBay, the local newspaper and others. It’s an interesting idea, but some are wondering about the legality of it. The business model of the company is to put contextual ads along side the results. Deep linking to stories has been shown to be legal (in most places…), but does it get more complicated when you’re deeplinking into ads? The obvious answer is that it shouldn’t matter at all. Services like this one drive more traffic to the ads, which should make everyone happy. Either way, what’s most interesting about this development is that it’s, yet another example of how people want advertising that’s relevant to them and which they have control over. Classified ads are ads after all. So, is there really a business model in placing contextual, machine generated ads next to ads that people are specifically searching for? It seems like a stretch.
Comments on “Putting Ads On Others' Ads”
Speaking of business models
How the hell does this site stay afloat?
Very feasible
I’m afraid I have to disagree. I think that it is a very feasible business model and I think that it will work: People search for, say, “MP3 player”. They get ads from eBay, etc. for an MP3 player. They also get ads from Google (if that’s what he’s going to use; more than likely so) for an MP3 player. Both should interest the searcher.
Re: Very feasible
Not new…there have been several similar (though perhaps smaller scale) sites about for a while. eg http://www.adtractor.com. Enter a URL and see the ads on that site, or search the database. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.