Publishers might like it if it looked nice and it worked - but....

a) I think it's very garish - the results page looks like it was thrown together in five minutes by someone using frontpage or dreamweaver for the very first time.

b) the more serious issue (design is relatively simple to sort) is the search simply does not work.

I did a search for holidays in Galicia in September

1st result was for holidays in France (erm no, Galicia is in North West Spain)

2nd result was for holidays in St Lucia (wrong again)

OK I thought so maybe Galicia was a bit niche - let's try holidays in Majorca in September - same results (well except this time St Lucia came first and Galicia came second)

Admittedly the flight search worked a bit better but I expected to see actual flight details not just five links to Archers holidays.

Sorry to be harsh but at the moment you would stand more chance arriviing at a destination in London on time driven by a blind cab driver on his first time in London who had just stepped off the plane from New York than you have of your search returning 'contextual' results.

Frankly I am amazed that the Daily Telegraph have allowed this onto their site when it clearly still requires heavy development.

Thank you for your comments. Valid points have been raised. This has been a soft launch and has only been live for two weeks so we are still tweaking the system and will continue to do so.

In regards to design - fair point. A new design will be launched early October to ensure a better look

As for search functionality, we base our searches on keywords. The number of advertisers signed up is actually quite low at the moment hence all destinations are not covered. However The Telegraph are actively recruiting advertisers and we expect to cover more destinations as they get more merchants signed-up.

Galicia in September is quite niche as you point out. If you run a similar search on Google only 3 advertisers have sponsored search listings. Majorca in September has no current advertisers fulfilling this destination at the present time either. If an advertiser joins who sells Majorca holidays etc then their ads will show. Our system serves random ads when no advertisers products fit the keyword searched for.

If however you search for Greece in September you will find the results are improved as we have a number of advertisers who sell Greek holidays etc.

Ashley & Everyone -

We will be launching our service in the UK in October and I believe people will be impressed with the control over media types (text, graphic, rich media) and pricing options we support for each site under their own brand.

To us, the most relevant targeting is, and always will be, content targeting.  Nothing helps match advertisements with content better than the content on the page and we believe our tools help sites place the best ads for their advertisers on any given site while maintaining control over the end-to-end relationship.

Russell Fradin
COO
Adify.com

Skype: RussFradin

On 10:12:08 13 September 2006 Ashley wrote:

Have you read through the previous thread on this - Adsense Alternative?

I'm not sure where Platefood are up to, but personally I think the Adify concept is very interesting.

It doesn't pretend to do any contextual matching but it does allow publishers / site owners to have a direct relationship with their advertisers and provides a self-service platform supporting a whole range of ad formats and pricing models.

It doesn't necessarily compete with AdSense or what Adprecision does (I've put them in their own category at the moment in my Site adverts - hierarchy of different types, values etc) but it may well mean that the likes of AdSense get relegated to less valuable page inventory space.

As far as I know Adify don't operate in the UK at the moment but are planning to sometime soon.

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

Hi Andrea!
Do you also power the Times classified section?
Justine

On 09:03:04 12 September 2006 AndreavanEugen wrote:

Hello all,

As some of you may know, Adprecision has recently launched the Telegraph’s
online travel classified library section:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/index.jhtml;

Please do take a look and let me know your thoughts.

We are serving contextual based ads against relevant editorial pages and
have included a free-text search box to search the library of classifieds.
Replacing Google AdSense allows the publisher to have a direct relationship
with the advertiser and charge what they like for keyword based advertising.
We believe we are the world's first technology company to serve ads  that
are automatically generated from client's product feeds.

Has anyone come across any other AdSense replacements that UK portals/
publishers are now using?

Do you think that content sites would like to take more ownership of their
own advertising?

Many thanks,

Andrea