donloeb.com

first off, congratulations to jz, arun, traci, jon, steve, and everyone else…i’m terribly impressed with our team - they pushed this out in record time…

so, what exactly are self-serve feed-powered ads? well, this new service enables publishers to create “live” ad units - i.,e take a custom background image or standard banner and then use feed content to automatically update the ad creative. we’re essentially allowing publishers (of all shapes and sizes) to use the existing headline animator service to develop and then traffic dynamic ad units…

why is this significant? two reasons…(1) it’s super easy for any of our 500k or so publishers to produce compelling creative that doesn’t need to be changed (the ad updates when the feed changes), and (2) these ads are “useful” and fit the feed-reading experience (note: these are not contextually targeted ads). for example, if i’m reading valleywag (yeah, i’ll admit it), i’ll start to see feed-based ads from other publishers (big and small). since i’ll be in “reading mode,” these ads should act as content discovery units…i can then click to preview the content, and if i like what i see, go to the site or subscribe to the feed (of course)…

here are a few examples…

btw, these ads can also be published to web pages and virally spread (see the “grab this” links)…and, we track these headline animators (err…widgets) across the web…

lastly, here’s an older post i wrote on feed-powered ads…

Tags: rss, feedburner, advertising, animated gifs, headline animator |