Done with AdBrite, permanently
June 22, 2007 11:24 am General InterestDon’t ever ask AdBrite for clarifications of their terms of service. They’ll ignore repeated emails and phone calls for a month, tell you it’s ok on the phone but that they won’t say it in writing, then tell you you’re being abusive by continuing to ask, and that you’re risking getting your account shut down. (There’s nothing against what I want to do in the TOS; I was just trying to be a good neighbor.)
I just shut my account down. I will not deal with a company that is offended by a customer wanting to check if their idea is okay before doing it. Scumbags.
Anyone know of a text ad auction system other than AdBrite?
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Buried as queer.
Your blog is exactly what Al Gore feared most when he created the Internet.
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Buhuhuuhuh. Nah, he just fears me as a matter of principle.
July 15th, 2007 at 2:13 am
okay i’ll bite. what was your question to adbrite?
July 15th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
I want a text ad vendor that allows flash embedding and movie distribution. MochiAds is kind of close to what I want, but they don’t do text ads, I want a different market model than the one they use, and I’ve been waiting them to clear my beta account for almost two months now.
What I wanted was an anonymous auction model, very much like the one TextLinkBrokers.com uses, but the problem is that they have the same kind of statistic system that everyone else has.
The fundamental issue is tracking. MochiAds and MochiBot are built to be embedded in flash movies that end up getting put in other places (like those flash games that end up on nine million sites.) That means that their accounts are tracked and economically built for multiple origin sites.
The way most advertising models are built are statistics built on point of origin, and that really doesn’t work for flash games and RIA flash apps. In fact, of the seventeen ad providers I’ve looked into so far, MochiAds is the only one I’ve found that has the kind of locality setup that flash games/RIA apps need.
Thing is, MochiAds is explicitly built for gaming. I don’t want the kind of ads they run; they wouldn’t work out for my demographic. I also don’t want someone else’s splash screen on my apps, especially when it’s for “omg make your name in glitter” or “holy crap we’ve got internet paper dolls” or whatever. That works really well for some things – casual games in particular. MochiAds targets their market very well.
The problem is that that isn’t the market I need at all, and as far as I know, they’re the only vendor whose technology could support this.
So, I went to the four ad providers who I thought I could cobble this onto. I wanted to run a juxtaposed server proxy to normalize statistics. I kind of didn’t expect a yes, but I did expect a prompt answer without threats, which is exactly what I got from TextLinkAds.com, TextLinkBrokers.com and CommissionJunction.com – they were sorry, they thought it was an interesting and powerful idea, but their technology could not support it.
I also got a no from AdBrite. Their no, however … well, you can tell how I feel about them these days.