AdPinion: Help pick the ads you'd like to click on by clicking on ads

by Brad Linder Jul 28th 2007

A lot of websites, including this one, make their money on advertising. The trick is to make the content prominent, and the advertising attractive but unobtrusive. Publishers don't want to annoy their readers, but they also want to encourage visitors to click on an ad occasionally.

The best way to do to that is to ensure that the advertising on your site is relevant to the content you cover. People reading a technology website aren't as likely to click on ads for new shoes as they are for notebook computers.

While Google and others focus on contextual ads that are selected based based on keyword content on your site, AdPinion takes another approach: let your readers vote on the ads they prefer. In time, you'll only be serving up the best ads for your site, as chosen by your readers.

At least that's how it's supposed to work. There's at least one major flaw in this plan. In order to select the ads you're most likely to pay attention to, you have to not only read the ads showing up on a given page, but also click on them.

While we can see how AdPinion would be attractive for advertisers trying to target niche audiences, we're just not sure that consumers are going to spend much time clicking on the thumbs up/down buttons on ads.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: adpinion, advertising

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters