nothing new
I’m a little late with my reaction to the article JenSense posted about the new TopicAds offering from CafePress, but I still feel the need to comment. There was also a ClickZ article about it, and I’m sure there are many other reiterations all over the blogosphere.
In short, the TopicAds release is nothing new. Yes, tagging is hot. It’s also extremely useful. But it’s been something used in the online publishing world for a very long time. I previously worked as a Product Manager for ad serving solutions (both advertiser and publisher solutions), and the publisher platform I worked on called this ability “keyword targeting”. The ad tags placed on the publisher page had a parameter for the “keyword” (a.k.a. “tag”), which could be input either manually or automatically by the content management system. Likewise, the publisher could associate keywords/tags with every ad entered into the ad serving system for delivery. When the page was served and the ad tag called the ad servers for the most relevant ad, the keyword/tag descriptors would be the main driver for determining which ad should be served on the page.
I’m not knocking CafePress. Quite the opposite, actually, since they have obviously done a great job marketing their new feature. And they are heading in the right direction by introducing this ability to their affiliates in an easy to use manner. I just hate seeing the industry react as if this were some terrific new breakthrough concept. It’s not.
Also, let’s keep in mind what CafePress sells - shirts, mugs, mousepads, and baby bibs. Not exactly the most exciting product line.
I’ll tell you what would be really exciting though, and would be relatively easy to do. It’s actually something I considered orchestrating myself, but I just don’t have the time (read as: I just don’t have the funding :-). Take a contextual targeting solution (maybe Chitika, who can probably be snatched up pretty cheaply), feed it with every affiliate advertiser/merchant/product/service/offer available (which could be done pretty easily via data feeds from CJ, TradeDoubler, LinkShare, Performics, etc.), and then get it running on every blog network out there (as well as individual blogs). On top of the contextually based advertising, give all the blog/page owners the option of recommending their favorite product(s) from the arsenal of product offerings available from all the affiliate merchants. Pay the blog/page owner a percentage of the sales revenue (not click revenue) for the products they choose to manually select and recommend to their readers. Readers are most likely loyal fans. Loyal fans/readers usually have some level of compatibility will the author. So chances are that the recommended products will have higher sales conversion rates than the contextually based ads.
The key to this would be the UI. The blog/page owner would need a way to easily browse and select all the product offerings. It might be somewhat of a challenge to build such a great UI, but it is definitely possible. And there is a ton of revenue potential.