Text Link Ads

Jason mentioned text links ads recently, so I thought I'd signup to see what all the fuss was about. What caught my attention was that not only do they offer both publishers and advertisers a wealth of options they also offer some very slick integration techniques for a wide variety of website platforms. If you are running Wordpress, for example, you can integrate the ads using an actual Wordpress plugin, so instead of messing about with code all you need to do is add a new template tag. If you want to put the ads on a vBulletin site they offer plugins for that software also. The CMS/software supported at present is:

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• vBulletin
• Movable Type
• PostNuke

while they also offer a range of integration options for server-side languages such as Perl, Asp, PHP and Cold Fusion. The only thing that seems to be missing is vanilla HTML. However, if you investigate their publishing system it becomes clear why they rely to heavily on server-side scripts. The entire system runs off XML, so it needs some form of server-side magic to make it all happen. I'll be experimenting with the system over the next few days / weeks to see how well it works. The only downside I see at present is that the number of Irish publishers is quite low, so from an advertiser's perspective this may not be overly attractive as yet. However, I'm sure that the numbers will increase over time if the platform takes off. If you are an existing adsense publisher there's no reason why you could not use text link ads alongside your existing adsense blocks, as the ads are not contextual.