With regards to these MashUpAds, to me it’s only an example of one of many users of their technology. All they’ve done is said “well, using Dapps to power ads is a good idea” and showcased how it could be done. The only new technology presented here is that they create a template .swf file that automatically includes a dynamic XML document (any decent developer should know how to load an XML document anyway, ffs).

Let me try to explain the impact of this technology. Google right now indexes webpage, and extracts what “keywords” are associated with that webpage. This is BABY STUFF compared to the power of a Dapp. With a Dapp you can extract, systematically, different sections of the website, and use *any* of this data to generate structures far more complex and relevant than just a list of “keywords.” In fact, the dumbest use of this data “find the most commonly occuring word” is not too far off from adwords. In the best case, you get extremely intelligent results, catered to any site. Instead of simply “keywords,” you get “place user wants to visit,” “website getting reviewed on techcrunch,” “search string,” “number of results found in search,” “movie user is looking up on IMDB,” “actors in this movie,” etc… And these are just simple examples. Imagine an ad that using this type of information efficiently.

A user is viewing an IMDB movie entry. You sell DVDs, and want to advertise on IMDB. You make a Dapp to cross reference the movie they are looking up with your inventory to see if you have it on sale. Nothing? Ok, check out the leading actors of the movie, use a Dapp to find other movies they’ve been in, and see if you have any of those on sale. Still nothing? Ok, do something which would be pretty cool, and pull the date the movie was made and show an ad that says “buy the best movies of .” All this could be done without having either you or IMDB create an API… eg: you could make a Dapp that pulls your movies that are on sale.

Imagine the CTR on that type of ad… you’d be well off even paying double for the adspace on IMDB.

As someone with a company in the travel industry we are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized and to provide a superior product. It seems like reducing the product to a thumbnail and a bottom-line price is only useful to bargain motels and huge chains trying to fill extra capacity.

Steven Finch
http://crenk.com
http://adphilia.com

They appear to be leveraging their mashup experience and applying it to the online advertising area; sounds like a nice play to me.

As someone who has years of painful experience with Google AdWords, I can seriously say here today that Dapper’s MashupAds is couple of times better than Google AdWords. This is because Dapper’s MashupAds lets advertisers create unlimited number of…

We do this via Adwords for more than a year with very good CTR/CPC results.

1. Read content from our database (same db that is used by the website)

2. Run a daily batch job to upload content to our Adwords account via the iMacros tool (Simple Perl scripts do not work well with Adwords).

3. Done

The result are “fresh” Adwords and Adsense ads every day.