Iowa City and their pedestrian mall is easily one of the best places to spend a couples days at in the Midwest. Being a college town, it’s a bit of an oasis in the Midwest for all sorts of fantastic local restaurants, arts, and people. Without the pedestrian mall, it wouldn’t be half the city it is today.
Shameless plug: this is what we are trying to do at https://contextcue.com. Ads that are targeted to the website you’re on, instead of the person viewing the ad. We’d love any feedback about what we are trying to accomplish!
I think that this could be a boon to pixel tracking. From my understanding, a site could embed multiple tracking pixels on a page to give a good approximation of how far the user scrolls and how long it takes them to scroll down the page, all without JavaScript.
I would be curious if this would also be apply to email clients that render using Chrome.
Nope, we don't do any individual targeting. We base the ads on the website that that the ads are on. We believe that targeting based on the website will still provide relevant ads because the user is already interested in the content of the website. In fact, we don't store any cookies on the user's device.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Those links were to old pages that don't exist anymore, so I removed them from the original page.
We have moved most of our support/information resources over to https://support.contextcue.com for now, since we do have limited resources and we would rather be spending time building the network than building contact forms :)
We use JavaScript to fetch the ads, but the ads themselves are static images. We went with static images for a few reasons.
1) Speed. There's no need to download a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
2) Security. No JS in the ads means no bitcoin mining on the ad network [1]
3) Privacy. Since we host all of the images/ads, advertisers can't inject their own tracking code.
If the JavaScript to load the ads is a non-blocker, send me an email and we can discuss other options.
This is a great question, and a very important one.
The number of users referred to your site or product (based on traffic logs) should be similar to the number of ad clicks that you're charged for. This won't be 100% accurate due to some browsers removing the referral header, but there should be a strong correlation between the two.
I think ultimately though, it's about trust. I don't believe it's in our long term interest to attempt to defraud our partners as a company. We do well when our partners do well, and providing fake numbers will cause our partners to have a lower ROI, making them less likely to stay on our network.
It will take time for us to establish trust, but I believe that we won't be successfully unless both advertisers and publishers trust us.
Thanks for trying this out! We should probably warn potential users that this is still in the early stages (we've been working on this for nearly a year and figured we should get some feedback).
1. Definitely a good idea (I'm glad you could find it in the FAQ though!)
2. We definitely need to be able to edit sites, just didn't make it in time.
3. We probably need to revisit how the development flow is here. I believe the site needs to match the hostname + port. Ex. "localhost:3000"
https://www.thinkiowacity.com