Re: Advertising in RSS feeds

On 22/10/2004 13:53, James Aylett wrote:

> As soon as you make the adverts external to the feed, you get into
> advert rotation through the publisher's ad server (which is a good
> thing, because it makes this manageable). Some of the main ones won't
> play well straight off with a fixed mechanism for making up query
> strings - some use query strings already.

We would need to strike a balance between complexity of implementation 
and flexibility. Appending a parameter to a query string is pretty 
simple and easy to understand.

> It's a good idea, though. Some publisher ad servers can record
> keywords in their serve and click requests and then generate a report
> based on that at a future date, but that does require URL mangling of
> a more extreme form. Given that the agent will have to be configured
> for the affiliate token, I wonder if varying the feed for each
> affiliate is going to be impractical - it certainly solves these
> problems. An alternative might be to have an agentReplaceToken, so
> <rss:link>http://pub.com/click/spooncampaign/AGENT/....?whatever</rss:link>
> would just need a quick strreplace to get the affiliate-specific URL.
Yes that's a good pragmatic alternative. The point being that the agent 
should be able to simply construct a url that includes its token.

> 
> Incidentally, I'd recommend not having ad:button, ad:banner etc. (for
> a start: what size is a button?). We should perhaps look at the IAB
> 'universal' ad package, and either take their lead on names (they seem
> to be getting good adoption) or (my preference) go for something like
> <ad:image width='xx' height='xx' rdf:resource="..."/> (or however it
> would look in RDF), and let the agent choose which to display.

When I wrote those I had the standard sizes in mind but didn't want to 
overcomplicate things. The relevant page is 
http://www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp


> Oh, and 'publisherLink' is a strange thing to call a link to the
> agency :-)
Hey, it was off the top of my head :)

Ian

> 
> James
> 



 
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