eBay Enters Contextual Ad Business - Who Will Benefit
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So before you sign up for that monthly check from eBay, how do you know AdContext will be right for you? Well, a number of observers have noted that the program is designed to help the little guy make a better living online. If you’re running an online store, it’s probably not for you, but if you’re trying to monetize content rather than sell goods, that’s another story.
So in that sense, if you’re a blogger, you might want to take a look at this program. But you probably have some questions. If you’re already using Google ads or other context-based search engine ads on your blog, you know that they can be, well, jealous. When is the last time you saw a site running both Google and Yahoo ads?
If you want to run eBay ads on your site, but don’t want to stop running Google ads, you’ll obviously need to ask Google about it first. But at least one person who claims to have checked with Google “three times just to be positive” received a good answer: “Google says it is permitted to have these ads on the same page as AdSense ads. While they are contextual ads, Google views them as eBay ads due to the nature of their content, and eBay ads are permitted on the same page as AdSense ads.” My guess is eBay really did its homework on this before getting the program ready for launch, precisely so it would be able to target the same people who are already Google AdSense users.
Developers will also benefit from the program. They’ll be able to create applications different from traditional contextual ad serving thanks to a new API call. This new call returns ranked eBay keywords and categories for a specified web page. In fact, there are a total of four new APIs, all of which will be free for developers to use. In addition to the one I just described (“Get Contextual Keywords”), there will be one called “Get Product,” which lets developers do queries of eBay’s product database; “Get Search Results Express,” which will let developers search the eBay Express site and show those results to their own users; and finally, “eBay Express Shopping Cart,” which, as you would expect, opens access to the eBay Express shopping cart, so users can actually buy the items they find.
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