Platform for shareware ads

Question

People,

I am working on a small piece of rich client software that I would like to distribute for free. That is, I would still like to make money on this, but I would like the income to come from advertising.

Do you know about an advertising platform that works well for client applications? I would like the ads to be completely unobtrusive (e.g. Google AdSense for websites). I would not want to pop up or something else awful UX. I just want a small little ad in the corner of my add-on.

It would be great if the ads could be contextual (that is, if the platform had an API to tell her that the user is currently looking at - give a few keywords - to show the most relevant ads).

Any thoughts / ideas?

Answer 1

True, using Google Adsense would be against TOS, but you could curtail your own ad engine. For example, you can create an Amazon affiliate account and display books that match the keywords in your small ad space. (anyone who clicks on a book and buys will earn you money for the sale) Everything related to affiliation (provided that your keywords lend themselves to this kind) will work. Consult with TOS affiliates, but since they tend to pay on sales, I don’t see a problem.

In the late 90s, Eudora did something similar, and Microsoft is now doing the same with their "Live" products. But I don’t know, someone is doing the content delivery side ... (the opportunity is there!)

Unfortunately, other ad programs received very poor rap. (e.g. Cydoor, Claria)

My advice would be to create an application with the ability to display ads and a basic controller that captures the xml file of available ads from your site. Initially, your xml file could have nothing but "how is this application"? Donate'-ad, but as soon as you have a lot of users and you see that your application will use an honest bit, then it’s worth trying to sell the advertising space in your application.

Answer 2

I have never found anything like it. There would be many technical problems, and the advertising-in-client program is not something you see very often (I never saw it myself).

The simple thing you could do (assuming it's Windows) would be to put an Internet Explorer control the size of a website in your form . You can create a web page that simply displays only one Google ad (or something else), and point the IE control to that page.

Answer 3

Opera tried this. They don’t do this anymore. I suspect it was not very effective. However, if you do this work, then great.

Answer 4

I was hoping to do the same. I have google adwords on my site and the revenue was fine, but I would like to put it in my program.