Ad Mates

How did the Community Advertising Project come to life?

Daniel Jalkut had the original idea and he posted it as a free idea on his blog. The feedback was unanimously positive, so I (Jan) immediately started hacking away.

The reason behind the idea was to help independent Mac developers to get their applications promoted in a fair and cheap way. The concept is dead simple, for each ad from your group you show on your site, you get your ad shown on another group-member’s site.

After two weeks of on-and-off coding, I had a functional prototype running and after two more weeks a private beta with 8 participants began. Everything worked so far, so I improved the administration part a bit and here we are now.

How does it work?

You and your friends create (free) accounts on this site and you all join the same group. Each of you can upload as many ads as you like. You can then manage a list of ads that is shown on your site. That is, if you don’t want an ad to be shown on your site, just don’t select it. This is useful if you and another group member have competing products that you don’t feel like advertising on each other’s sites.

All you need to do now, is copy the short html snippet from the Help section and paste it into your website. That’s it.

For each ad you show on your page, you earn a credit point. For each time your ad gets shown elsewhere, you loose a credit point. If you drop below 0 credit points, you need to show some more ads before your ad gets shown again.

Wha! — Groups?

There are two types of groups — Public and private. The use should be obvious. Everybody can join a public group and a private group is protected by a password.

A single account is always tied to a single group, so you can’t be in multiple groups at once. But you can easily create new accounts and join more than one group with them.

What do the ads look like?

At the moment, ads are served as 120x90px, 72dpi, no-alpha-channel png files. They can optionally have up to 75 characters of text including links.

Can I support a group by showing their ads without having an ad of my own?

Of course! This is what a number of folks been doing during the beta phase. They didn’t yet have a product ready for advertising, but they wanted to try things out, support others and — most importantly — build up credit points they can spend later.

Can I see the ads in action?

Sure, here’s a list of sites that run the ads:

• Martin Pilkington — M Cubed
• Jordy Rose — Belkadan
• Bob Clark — Clarkwood
• Apokalypsesoft
• Jan Lehnardt

How much is this?

Nada. It’s free and no ads, heh :-)

Can I support you?

If you’d like to see a specific feature and don’t want to wait for me to eventually do it, you can encourage me with donations and speed things up. Also, the original deal is still on.

What is the original deal?

When donations for the Community Advertising Project reach $499, I’ll make the source code to it freely available as an Open Source Project. See the original announcement for more information.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://ads.traeumt.net/serve/ad/"></script>
		

	[See here](http://my-page.com “This is a link title“)
		

<a href="http://admates.net/serve/redirect/10" id="caLink">
<img id="caImage" src="http://admates.net/Ads/1113_a2d0.jpg" />
</a>
<div class="caText">
<a href="http://jan.prima.de/" title="My App">My App</a> is the best. Click on the link and see for yourself;
</div>
		

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	border:0px;
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	margin:2ex auto 0 auto;
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#caAd {
	margin-top:0px;
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