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January 30, 2006

ZoomTags and Commercial Tag Clouds

Michael Arrington

29 comments »

ZoomTags, based in Sunnyvale, California, is a professional implementation of the commericial tagcloud idea introduced by 1000Tags, which I wrote about earlier this month.

ZoomTags is an API-based solution and allows blogs and other websites to place a commercial tagcloud on their sites. Like 1000Tags, Zoomtags allows advertisers to bid on tags or keywords in a tag cloud. When someone clicks on a tag, they see a set of advertiser results. This are Adsense type ads in a tagcloud.

Website owners will have a variety of tagclouds to choose from.

ZoomTags, which is part of ZoomGroups, already has a fairly established advertiser network that has been in place since 1999.

Nothing, of course, stops Yahoo and Google from implementing a similar interface if this proves to be a better way for some sites to serve ads.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Matt

    January 30th, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    Wow, I can’t believe they are claiming this is “targeted.” This is a really retarded idea, IMHO.

  2. Michael Arrington

    January 30th, 2006 at 8:59 pm

    It can’t be much less targeted that Adsense is on blogs today.

  3. Christopher Sisk

    January 30th, 2006 at 9:47 pm

    I think, until average users catch on, they will get a lot of inadvertent click-throughs. Most people will assume the tag cloud is for the originating site.

  4. Matt

    January 31st, 2006 at 1:19 am

    Mike - you could be right, I suppose I don’t understand how it works. If the tags are just links to a group of advertisements, and from these advertisements the click revenue is charged, then I suppose its not worse. I guess I don’t see anyone being excited about following that model (as a user) - but then again I haven’t clicked on an AdSense ad in my entire life, and block them with FireFox.

  5. Boris

    January 31st, 2006 at 1:39 am

    Check Weblogistan.com for LinkClouds. Very similar system but free for every visitor to add information to. Sort of a graffiti area on your website. I built it for bloggers who want to have more space for visitors to interact with the page and it is a lot more fun than an Ad Cloud like this company proposes…

  6. John Butler

    January 31st, 2006 at 1:54 am

    This all looks very interesting, it’d be great if you could actually register with them properly in order to get to the Zoomtags section of their site. The form is broken however! Doesn’t inspire great confidence.

  7. RBA

    January 31st, 2006 at 3:54 am

    Matt, that’s an interesting comment. We say it’s targeted because users wont see any ad unless they first click on the tag/keyword of their choice. Of course that’s not to say that people will only click on tags that seem appealing to them, but if you compare it to adSense, here the user, not an algorithm, is in control, so in a way it is no less targeted than adSense - perhaps even more targeted.

    Christopher, the tag clouds will be properly labeled on top. At this moment the label reads “ZoomTags Ads”. I believe it is important to make clear that the user is going to see ads and not something else.

    John, I’d be happy to know where you’ve found a problem in the registration form. QA didn’t find a problem and we don’t seem to being able to replicate it.

    Regarding confidence, well, I won’t claim the service is impecably perfect but we’ve been serving clients like Yahoo, Amnesty International and many others for quite some time, and I think they’re very satisfied with the quality of our service.

    Mike, one clarification. With ZoomTags advertisers don’t bid on tags. The site follows a fixed pay-per-click fee. Advertisers define their ad just like they’d do with adSense, assign a few tags to them, and that’s it.

  8. B.P.

    January 31st, 2006 at 7:45 am

    I found another site doing the commercial tag thing at http://tenthousandbrightideas.com

    They seem to have mangled and stretched the idea of tags though.

  9. Andrew

    January 31st, 2006 at 10:58 am

    Hey RBA-

    I’m curious if you will offer more in-depth reporting than the black box that is AdSense. Will you have click-level statistics for the sites that run your tag cloud?

    Thanks!

  10. Srinivasan

    January 31st, 2006 at 11:36 am

    We have implemented a simpler, no frills version here: http://www.web20milliondollarhomepage.com

  11. RBA

    January 31st, 2006 at 11:43 am

    Hello Andrew,

    With ZoomTags you’ll be able to see clicks and earnings either by the hour, day, week, month or year. These stats pages have been used on the other services we’ve been running for several years already, and I think they’re pretty decent.

    I don’t claim they’re better than adSense’s, but so far no advertiser has asked for more details, although that might change of course, and in that case, chances are we’ll be happy to add that information. You can see an empty sample image here: http://www.zoomgroups.com/pics.....sample.gif

    Now, if you check our blog [http://zoomtags.zoomblog.com/], you’ll see we just added a new option for advertisers that makes daily reporting a bit harder, but in the long term I think it will be better for everyone.

  12. RBA

    January 31st, 2006 at 11:52 am

    Correction on my last comment. I mentioned ‘advertisers’ but I meant to say ‘affiliates’. The truth is that stats pages for both, advertisers and affiliates, are very similar. The screenshot I posted is actually from an affiliate account.

  13. PWK

    January 31st, 2006 at 1:35 pm

    This works exactly like adsense link units but with a cloud layout instead of a vertical or horizontal list.

    Why won’t the tags take you directly to a sponsors page instead of a list of sponsors? Sounds like an interesting option to build in.

  14. Stanley Wong

    January 31st, 2006 at 7:35 pm

    As a long time advertiser, I think this idea is dumb.

    The user is supposed to click twice to get through to my page and as a result it makes it effectively twice as hard to get good traffic from something like this.

    This thing looks unique and because of the novelty factor it’ll get some curiosity seekers to click on it.

    Where this idea can really hit it out of the ball park is to intelligently identify the different potential contexts (ie. madonna = religious vs. pop singer?) of the page based upon text. If the user clicks on a keyword or link on this page we would get a higher quality customer on the page.

  15. Andrew

    January 31st, 2006 at 10:17 pm

    RBA, thanks for the answer - I was asking from a site’s perspective. Right now with AdSense, a site owner just gets a check every month, with no info on how many clicks actually generated that money, when they occured, how much was charged per click, etc. This is rather frustrating for the bigger sites that would like to consider AdSense as a real revenue source.

    Can you guys offer better reporting for the site owners?

    Thanks!

    By the way, while the above comment may be correct, 2 clicks vs. 1 isn’t ideal, I think this may be more compelling for the user in the end, since it’s user driven and not algo-driven (from what I understand).

  16. RBA

    February 1st, 2006 at 1:26 am

    Andrew, yes of course. We give date and time of the clicks, from what countries those clicks were made, etc. (we don’t give the IP addresses from where the clicks were made for obvious privacy concerns, but that’s about it I think).

    I also agree with you on the comment that 2 clicks vs 1 is not necesarily a bad thing. As I think we mention in our web page, the volume may be smaller, but in return, the ROI is likely higher.

    Bottom line, if any of the big players were to do this, novelty aside, I think it’d prove to be very sustainable. Since we’re not a big player, our road is still going uphill, but we’ve been in business for quite some time, so whatever the outcome, I’m sure it’ll be rewarding. In fact, it already is.

  17. Bob Roberts

    February 1st, 2006 at 4:51 am

    That tag cloud site mentioned above, Tenthousandbrightideas.com just hit the news: http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/.....rweb340640

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