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September 27, 2006

TLA Launches Feedvertising

Michael Arrington

46 comments »

Text Link Ads (an advertising network that allows websites to include simple text advertisements on their site) launched a new product this morning called Feedvertising. Feedvertising allows bloggers and other site owners to include advertisements or other messages in their RSS feeds.

We like Feedvertising (note disclosure at end, however) because it’s simple, free, and gives the publisher the ability to sell their own ads directly, include TLA sold ads, or simply put in any message and link that the publisher wishes to include.

We’ve integrated Feedvertising into the main TechCrunch RSS Feed via a Wordpress plugin (plugins for other blogging platforms is coming soon). We’ve elected not to include advertising, instead adding a simple text item at the end of feed content that promotes other Crunch Network sites.

For more information on how the product works, see the video tutorial they’ve created here. I believe a lot of bloggers will want to use this.

Disclosure: TLA has been a longtime TechCrunch Sponsor.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 10:06 am 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.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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  13. Feedvertising: Really Simple RSS Advertising - JohnTP.com

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  14. Monetizing with Feedvertising » Online Marketing Blog

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  15. nonsmokingarea.com » Blog Archive » selling RSS-adspace with Feedvertising

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  16. qxfwgjpt

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  17. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Thank You Sponsors

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  18. BlogBot » Feedvertising: Really Simple RSS Advertising

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  19. Thank You Sponsors » JenIT

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  20. // Jerry's Technobabble

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Comments

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  1. Thilak

    September 27th, 2006 at 11:18 am

    Yeah, Its should great from all prespective… It won’t harm our readers too, since they re just text links.

  2. Alex

    September 27th, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    And is this feedvertising RSS wordpress plugin freely available? If so, link?

    Thanks.

  3. Martín

    September 27th, 2006 at 2:07 pm

    I love the new ideas on the net… but I don´t think that this wil be the future of advertising on the net…

  4. Chris P.

    September 27th, 2006 at 3:04 pm

    Alex, the plugin is uniquely generated for your site, so you have to grab it from the Text Link Ads Web site.

  5. Chris P.

    September 27th, 2006 at 3:05 pm

    Agh, sorry to hog the comments…

    Alex, it’s also FREE.

  6. Kevin Burton

    September 27th, 2006 at 5:19 pm

    Disclosure #2….. TLA is a domain spammer……. I’d highly recommend not doing business with them.

    At least with feed advertising their going partially legit…

    I’ve talked about them before and I really wish you’d stop accepting them as a sponsor Mike.

    They violate everything we stand for as bloggers…. You can’t buy Google placement….

    Adam has a good explanation of how they’re spammers …

    http://kalsey.com/2006/06/are_text_link_ads_spam/

  7. Terry

    September 27th, 2006 at 6:48 pm

    no, not like that. in web2.0 u gotta have some random words as name. like tootou, horo, penpo. “feedvertisement” sounds like a concept, and it would be one. so people might think it represents all similar things.

    like, not a single new and successful website’s name has direct relationship with its services.

    hoho…just chillin’

  8. David Krug

    September 27th, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    Kevin,
    Now you are calling them “domain spammers”. I’m not even sure what that is. You seem to have gotten it in your system not to like them and so you do everything in your power to discredit a good thing.

    Yet all your business model does is aggregate content from blogs. Are you giving money back to the bloggers? Huh, interesting. To me if you are going to call someone a spammer you better be able to stand up and make a good case instead of just slapping around some words that don’t really mean anything.

    I might not like Mike Arrington. In fact I think he’s an arrogant guy who I’ve only once brushed past in passing. I do like the Text Link Ads guys. They make alot of us bloggers happy, and even well fed.

    Anyhow. Your claims that they are a spammer are full of it. But I understand your positioning. It’s build on sand. You seem to bring this shit out of the wood work anytime anything good gets said about them.

    On a sidenote. Feedvertising rocks. I’m really excited about its potential.

  9. Vlad

    September 27th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

    I storngly disagree with Kevin Burtons comment. TLA is not a spammer.
    Article that you provided says that TLA violates Adsense’s TOS. I am not sure where that guy comes from…. Maybe it is becuase his website was not accpted by TLA?

  10. Mercury

    September 27th, 2006 at 10:36 pm

    If adsence of google has any problem with it, thats their issue. Why should you blame TLA for it?

  11. Michael Arrington

    September 27th, 2006 at 10:46 pm

    Kevin, What they do is not spamming. It’s a legitimate and very cool service.

  12. Tobbi

    September 28th, 2006 at 12:17 am

    unfortunately, it is only available for Wordpress, isn’t it?

    Why doesn’t Text-Link-Ads work with blogger.com? I just need a JavaScript-code :-|

  13. Brian

    September 28th, 2006 at 2:32 am

    I will say that regardless of what some may say about the regular TLA model (which just goes to show that people have truly been brainwashed by Google) the Feedvertising technology is fantastic, and the free and open model that they’ve taken to sharing it is exactly what is great about blogging and social media.

    Kevin, partially legit? Come on man… you blew your position right there.

  14. Karthik

    September 28th, 2006 at 5:29 am

    Hey This is something really cool.. Anyways I am trying out this and let me see how it works out to be. I’ll post a review sometime later..

    Maybe they should introduce support for non standard feeds like those feeds which do not belong to a blog..

  15. Tom Markiewicz

    September 28th, 2006 at 7:32 am

    I’m not sure I see how TLA is a spammer when the publisher of the site is willingly accepting the text link ads (and also have editorial control over what ads get displayed).

    I’ve had great success over the past month with TLA, both from the advertiser as well as publisher side. On the advertiser side I’m judging performance from click-throughs (more than I expected so far) and on the publisher side I’m making much more money on my blog than using AdSense.

    These guys are doing a great job of making alternative advertising platforms work.

  16. Kevin Burton

    September 28th, 2006 at 1:59 pm

    Michael, David.

    It really can’t get any simpler than this….

    They’re paying bloggers to create artificial links to game/spam Google. It hurts everyone who needs to search for a product and finds the resulting spam. It might not be black hat SEO but it’s certainly dark gray.

    As far as blogging are concerned this is just about as unethical as you can get….

    “Yet all your business model does is aggregate content from blogs. Are you giving money back to the bloggers? Huh, interesting. ”

    I give the same thing that Google, Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, and Techmeme give - traffic… I’m not hearing any complaints.

    Kevin

  17. Scouse

    September 28th, 2006 at 2:05 pm

    I agree with David Krug above.

    All I ever seem to see on is Kevin Burton whoring tailrank in signatures or profiles, usually trying to steal someone elses limelight.

    If you really think TLA is gaming google you should be accusing half of the net, most sites with reasonable PR have text link ads, how can you tell which are paid for and which are ‘natural’?

  18. Adam Kalsey

    September 28th, 2006 at 3:11 pm

    Uhh, Vlad….

    Nowhere in my article (the one that Kevin linked to) do I mention Adsense. Nor do I say it’s against a TOS of any sort. I do have a quote from valleywag that mentioned (erroniously) the Google search TOS.

    What I DO say is that Google doesn’t like it. Great. Why should you care what Google thinks of the practice, right?

    It’s true that you can do what you like on your site and don’t have to cater to Google’s whims. But don’t be surprised or even upset when Google knocks you from their index.

    Gaming search engines hurts overall search quality and is bad for the interwebs. This is no different from the keyword stuffing and hidden text that was widely used when web search was young.

  19. Adam Kalsey

    September 28th, 2006 at 3:19 pm

    Oh, yeah. A few disclosures, lest someone think I’m being disingenuous…

    I was founder of Pheedo, an RSS ad provider, and althrough I still own stock, I don’t work for the company any longer.

    I have a new startup that’s involved in the advertising industry, although I wouldn’t consider TLA a competitor in any way. (Mike, if you still read your comments, that’s what they call a scoop. :) )

    I’m an unpaid advisor to Tailrank, Kevin Burton’s company. I think I might own a little stock as a result of that, so if Kevin does well, I might be able to afford the large coffee occasionally.

    I’m a lumberjack, and I’m okay, I sleep all night and I work all day. On Wednesdays I go shoppin’ and have buttered scones for tea.

  20. Kevin Burton

    September 28th, 2006 at 3:22 pm

    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.....-pagerank/

    Long story short……. if you start using text links don’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find you’re outbound pagerank zero’d out.

    The unethical part is that many people don’t realize this and will end up being hurt. :-/

  21. Seth Besmertnik

    September 30th, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    Kevin - did you read that Matt Cutt’s blog post that you just linked to?

    It clearly says:

    “Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized…”

    I’ve never seen a site penalized for placing paid links on their site - there is no logic to that. Perhaps if you link to “bad neighborhoods” then you will lose trust, but that is true regardless of whether the link is paid or natural.

  22. Brian

    October 8th, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    This post is about Feedvertising, not the general TLA business model.

    It’s telling that Kevin couldn’t defend his initial potshot when I called him on it.

    Agenda?

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