Where the ads are
Just a short note to explain how and where I place advertising in Mowser. First, I haven’t bothered to put any ads on the site that PCs can see yet, though I’m sure I’ll slap some Yahoo! or Google ads on the pages eventually. Right now the only people that see advertising are those that use mobile browsers.
I have ads on three different sections: The directory of Mobile Links (which I created over at Mobitopia and will be expanded when I get a minute), the directory of popular news feeds (which I gathered from the top lists around the web - and which will also be updated over time) and then on a summary page of individual feeds themselves.
The feed summary pages provide a mobile service similar to PC-oriented sites like Topix.net, Rojo, Original Signal and other ad-supported general news pages on the web. There’s a thumbnail snapshot of the item’s web page (grabbed from Snap.com right now), and then a 500 character excerpt of the articles, with no markup included (i.e. formatting, images or links). So even if a site provides “full” feeds, the feed summary page only displays a snippet of the content, and then links to the content adapter for the full article. The ads are separated cleanly from the snippets with a horizontal rule and well marked. Having advertising on these summary pages is both ethical and legal, and in point of fact, how RSS and Atom feeds were originally meant to be used, driving traffic back to the original publisher’s site, or in Mowser’s case, the mobile-adapted version.
The content adapter, however, has NO advertising from Mowser, and if there is advertising it has been included by checking for a special admob header the publisher has included in their pages. I hope to eventually drive enough traffic through the adapter so that I can make affiliate deals with advertisers, but right now there is no advertising - or even branding - from Mowser on those pages.
Hope that clarifies what and how I’m using ads. If there’s any questions about it, please email me.
Thanks!
-Russ