Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, May 11, 2007:
Good Idea for an App
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Looking for an idea for your first app? Here’s one. An ad server. Banner ads, text ads, rich ads, etc. Aren’t there a million of these you say? Yep, but they all stink. Every single one I’ve looked at is horrible. Thrown together by some code monkey, no aesthetics, overly complicated, horrible websites that make you scared to give them your credit card. The market is wide open for a clean, simple, moderately priced solution.
Discussion
Dibs!
j/k.
Created by Jonathon on 05.11.2007 4:31 pm
Project Wonderful looks kinda interesting.
What I want is Google Adsense, but for Ajax. I've got lots of words for context; is it asking too much to just send them the words and get a bunch of related ads? Without waiting for Googlebot to index the page, which doesn't work for dynamic content anyway?
Created by Anthony Mills on 05.11.2007 4:42 pm
Ian,
You might want to look at http://www.adcanopy.com its a basic ad server that we market to small and mid size businesses that might have the features you are looking for.
- Jeff Walstrom
Created by Jeff Walstrom on 05.11.2007 6:33 pm
Is there something wrong with PhpAdsNew, now known as OpenAds.org? I've used it to serve millions of impressions of all kinds of ads.
Created by MSM on 05.12.2007 12:34 am
Adcanopy doesn't look too bad, but it's ASP and I need something which runs on Linux.
I've used phpads, it's OK, but it's too "big". I want something similar. It's just me using it, I'm not having hundreds of advertisers log into it and such. Also it was basically abandoned for years and is just getting some love recently with the move to openads. I might give it a look though since everything else is so bad.
Created by Ian on 05.12.2007 8:13 am
Yeah, it doesn't change often, but then it doesn't need to. There hasn't been a lot of "innovation" in the delivery of ads, and when there is (like text ads or interstitials) they get added into the mix pretty soon. We've been using it for about a year in the current deployment I'm working on, and it has had 2 or 3 updates in that year. Otherwise, it is pretty solid, and the database is reasonably well designed so we could wrap an API around it for our reporting systems to consume.
Created by MSM on 05.12.2007 10:16 am
Yeah, it just feels awfully heavy for my needs though. I'd happily pay for less complexity.
Created by Ian on 05.12.2007 10:21 am
What's your minimal requirements?
Created by Per on 05.14.2007 8:57 pm
Ian, would you mind telling a bit more (here or privately) about what you expect from this "clean, simple, moderately priced solution"? This idea can be exactly the type of product I want to build.
Created by Max Ischenko on 05.17.2007 8:34 am
Hi guys, sorry for the delay.
I don't have requirements really, I haven't given it that much thought. I guess where I would start is just having something that looks nice. It sounds silly, but everything else out there is horrible and the websites are even worse. A nice clean website with a nice clean app, even if it wasn't as feature filled as other apps.
In fact a "personal" ad server may be an interesting idea. In my case I don't care about advertisers or even really zones and such. I just want a system that can server ads via javascript or PHP include, can rotate ads, tracks impressions and clicks and that's pretty much it. It doesn't need to track money or any of that. Though I'd be fine if it was feature complete, but just didn't have a horrible UI.
I do think there's a market though for a personal size ad server, something like what Shaun Inman has done with Mint in the stat space.
Created by Ian on 05.17.2007 9:54 pm