The World Through My Eyes

Every once in a while, someone comes along, takes what appears to be the best of both worlds, puts it together and bang - you’ve either produced something great - or if you’re not quite so lucky something that’s going to be laughed at (like the Seat Toledo - A Volkswagen at the front, A Renault at the back and well, just messed up along the sides).

This has happened a lot in the online advertising market. Here’s another one…

What’s this one got over the rest?
AdRoll claim that they bring together the concepts of targeted advertising and social networking, the CEO Jared Kopf says they use a “social networking style matching system to enable publishers to create their own networks.” Interesting…

What this means is that people with small websites with similar content can get together in the hope of attracting an advertiser. So niche publishers organise themselves into communities of interest - an advertiser comes along and will hopefully be persuaded by the fact that this group of websites combined have enough potential to be advert-worthy.

To give you an example, 3 similar websites (A, B and C lets say) all receive 1,000 visitors per month - no one really wants to advertise with either because they’re too small on their own.

Site D on the other hand, has 3,000 visitors per month and gets a fair amount from advertising revenues.

Together Sites A, B and C have the same amount of traffic as Site D - so advertisers are likely to consider advertising with the 3 websites combined whereas they wouldn’t even have dreamt of advertising on either A, B or C individually.

Flawless, isn’t it?
I’m not in the best of positions to answer this as I’ve only just applied for a beta testing invitation - get yours while they’re still hot!

However, there are a few potential problems I can forsee…

• What happens if one website is holding the rest back? An advertiser comes along and likes the majority of the websites in the blogroll but there’s a few he doesn’t want to advertise on - will the community stick together or ditch the weaker websites? Can the group lose out on a deal just because of one or two websites?
• Will each website in the group receive an equal amount when it’s pay time? How will this be determined?
• Will similar websites want to participate - after all, aren’t the fellow advertisers the ‘competition?’

I’m pretty sure that they would have given these some thought and it will be interesting to see how these potential “issues” are dealt with.

What I think…
AdRoll definitely has a lot of potential. It’s a new take on advertising building on the ‘Safety in Numbers’ concept. It must be able to provide the push new bloggers with little bargaining power so desperately need.

I’m particularly eager because I blog on a variety of topics which makes it a lot harder to get targeted visitors. If AdRoll can bring similar websites together, maybe, just maybe there’ll be advertisers out there who will want to advertise on such a group of websites.

The key for AdRoll will be to build a diverse and large catalogue of advertisers and publishers alike. It’s just a matter of how well the service takes off and if any of the key players participate in it. It’s not going to be easy, the company faces the threat of Google and various other estbalished players, but their concept might just be good enough to cause some upsets in the online advertising market.

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