Ad Marketplace

The recent influx of digital advertising marketplaces such as AdBrite, Text-Link-Ads and others means that today’s site owner has a huge selection of advertising options, either as an advertiser or a publisher. One thing that all these have in common though is that they take a cut of your profits for the service. What if there was a way for advertisers and publishers to meet and engage without paying huge percentages to the matchmaker?

I’ve mentioned Sitepoint’s marketplace once before and I’m going to bring it up again. It’s a truly efficient service and allows it’s users to go about their trading with minimal interference. It’s more than possible to set up a similar niche marketplace offering only advertising.

An advertiser posts their needs in a paid thread and then publishers can respond with their offers. A simple service sure, but it allows the advertiser to get the maximum profit, and allows both the advertiser and publisher more freedom in the ability to place and monitor ads. The system could also work in reverse, with publishers posting a ‘Looking for Advertisers’ campaign.
Without taking a percentage of the ad revenue it is difficult to see a consistent source of income. This is true in some respects but not only could you charge an initial fee for posting an ad, there is also the ability to charge a finder’s fee. Alternatively a bid fee could be introduced for anyone responding to a request.

A key step to the success of the site would be finding the advertisers and publishers to enter the marketplace. There are plenty of traffic generating methods detailed all over the web but a few specific ideas could include:

• New accounts get free credits to post requests and place bids.
• Publisher’s place links from any temporarily un-filled ad placements on their site to the thread selling their advertising.
• Give the marketplace a boost by putting all your own sites on there, even including the ad marketplace as an advertising option for publishers.

When it comes down to it I think almost all ideas fall into a selection of categories. At some point I might try and separate these categories but today I’m just going to note that this falls into a common group of ideas: a niche version of an already popular idea.

Tweet This Idea