Endoh’s Dungeon

This review of Advertlets will be slightly different from others. While other reviews are commonly done by people who believes in making money out of their blogs, I don’t. So like a dinosaur long asleep in the icy caves, my review of Advertlets will take on a totally different perspective, from the keyboard of a non-believer. And I assure you it will be a very long and comprehensive review.

After almost eight months of keeping my blog clean of any form of advertising, I finally succumbed to the idea of that. Hopefully, these will make a few people happy that yes, your suggestions have got into my head. Fine fine… I will fill up the empty spaces, alright?

The thing that I do not hold faith about online advertising is the similarities between TV/Print commercials and the advertising blocks. As a person in the events industry, I always feel the interaction between advertisers and the eventual (or potential) customers are lacking. To put it simply, such advertising efforts are liken to be casting a big fishing net and waiting for the fishes to swim in by themselves. Think of how the Kelong works, you know the owners do not get fishes everyday.

How did I end up with Advertlets then?

The moment I hit Advertlets website, one message displayed there caught my attention. I am not going to repeat that message since you can see it on the left, and for a while I began to ponder - what kind of targeted advertisement can they do?

We have seen Adsense, and the targeted advertising is utterly horrendous. No doubt I have an account pending with Adsense, I do not carry much hope that their “targeted advertising” can be achieved with much success. Take a very quick run-down of blogs, advertisements displayed are either off-topic or include adult contents. Not very good for a general blog, I must say. How do I find out Advertlets capabilities? SIGN UP of course!

Signing up with Advertlets was a breeze. I was anticipating a whole load of junk I have to fill up, but surprisingly it was relatively easy. I also have to admit I hate complex forms to fill up, so Advertlets signup form won 10% of my heart. However, when prompted to choose the category of my blog via the drop-down list, I couldn’t really find what my blog is about. I chose Lifestyle, even though it doesn’t quite fit into it and also Culture. I think mine append more to society, which obviously wasn’t listed as one of the choices. Never mind that for now…

Quickly, I updated a little information about myself and fixed up the code as you can see on my sidebar. One thing I should remind everyone is, positioning of ad blocks are extremely important if one is into online advertising. The reason why I chose that spot is mainly due to the fact that the advertisement can’t be missed when someone tried to tag me through me shoutbox. Logical?

The other critical aspect of successful online advertising, is the content or rather the advertisement itself. Ahhhhh… now that’s where the true magic lies behind Advertlets. I was extremely pleased to see advertisements that relates closer to where I am. In fact, I was overjoyed when I saw the Manhattan Fish Market graphics because it is such a much talk-about eatery currently. How many of us would actually click on an advertisement that provides a service several thousands miles away? Adsense failed miserably in that, but Advertlets showed me that glimmer of hope of the true significance, application and execution of “targeted advertising”.

There’s even a poll for to help you to identify the demographics of your readers, so the best suitable advertisements are allocated to your blog. We know how much Adsense fail in their keyword matching isn’t it?

One very interesting thing that seems insignificant, is the ability for us to control our ad block. Notice that two icons? I am pretty impressed with it, because again Advertlets has something that sets it apart from any other online advertising medium. Click on them, and you will see that no space has been wasted. Those icons either turn you over to the polls, or give you an option to comment on the contents you see in that ad block. How many advertising mediums actually collect feedback from viewers? Not many, except the major media companies. Of course, how many people would actually explore that much when they do not even know about it? Now that I have told you, you know where to find what and what to do with these.

This is a very interesting aspect of the ad block because as you can see in my blog, adding a PollDaddy widget took up another space. By consolidating all these functions together within the ad block, the same space can be utilized for various purposes. However, one setback is the lack of varieties of polls we can place in there. (Advertlets called it hybrid polling system.) I actually thought of two suggestions which might make that little space even more interesting…

1. Allow a function for members to create a new poll to be inserted there.
2. Create a small space to indicate the poll available. For example; Take the Transport poll here.

You have read all the nice things, but it’s not perfect. Let me tell you the trivial problems I do not like about Advertlets.

Navigating through Advertlets website is relatively easy, however it turns me off whenever I have to do more than I should just to read a simple page. For those who are members, you would have realised upon signing in, whatever choices you choose on the menu bar throws you back to the members page menu.

This is how it looks like at the members page menu.

If you wish to navigate to the main website, you would have to click on the option of public website. From there, you can click on the options you like.

What irritated me the most was, immediately after my page is loaded with the website, the menu bar gets reverted back to the members page menu. To surf another section of the website, I have to click on public website again. So throughout the past hour while exploring the site, I have to do that repeatedly. The thing is, why can’t the menu stays in the mode I select? Why can’t I revert back only to the members page menu until I choose to do so?

It’s not a disastrous thing of course, but over time it becomes a hassle having to something so simple repeatedly.

I know most people do not read much into such advertising avenues when they signed up. I’m of a different breed in that aspect. I am not too keen in how the technical aspects of it is accomplished because I was never interested in transforming into a geek. Instead, I often read into how issues are handled by the owners or responders of the sites.

(I actually have a guest article in another blog due to be published in a matter of hours from now regarding Customer Relationship Management.)

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I happened to come across a blog entry by Advertlets on their blog, and for a while I figured it was a good article to explain their stand on payment issues. However, the article was tainted with sarcasm by whoever penned it and I must say it out loud that such conducts are very unprofessional. The only good thing was, the sarcasm wasn’t really that bad since the later part of the blog post was totally dedicated to the issue at hand.

I always feel businesses should not shut their eyes and ears to criticism, nor should they respond in an unprofessional manner. It is important to note that despite the fact Advertlets serves the blogging community, that shouldn’t imply that personal writing styles in our blogs should be utilized to retaliate towards criticism, truthful or untruthful. No matter how unruly a criticism from anyone, we should refrain from the slightest bit of deviation from how an official body should react towards the feedbacks and criticism. This is one area, that I hope I will not see often even if it does not affect any payments. The other fact I know is, who cares as long as I get paid? Not for me at least, because I didn’t blog for money and that’s evident from eight months of non-advertising blogging.

Be reminded, even the mildest unprofessional act can go a long way and become a bad habit in dealing with feedbacks. So take the personal writing style out of a proper advertising platform.

Overall, I feel Advertlets has met the objectives of targeted advertising which makes it such a popular advertising medium in any blogs. This is the most important factor which helped me to decide if I should sign up with Advertlets. It’s not about how much I can earn out of it, but to watch the magic of a true targeted advertising initiative at work.

As most advertisers knows, there’s only three general scenarios in advertising. Wrong place at the right people, right place with the wrong people or worse of all, wrong place with the wrong people. Advertlets does not seemed to fall into these categories of failures so it will be interesting to see how it can fulfil the expectations at the end of the day.

What about the money? Wait and see… that’s all.