I’ve been using Google AdSense on my blog for quite a while now, and have generally been pretty happy (hey - who’d complain about money for free?). Recently however, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the targetting of the ads that have been showing.
Naturally, I came up with the great idea that I could do better myself. A bit of hacking later, and now I have targetted Amazon ads running on my website. It isn’t quite as easy as it looks (maybe all those Google PhDs actually do something), but I think I’m getting roughly comparable results - although I’m limited by the performance of the Amazon search index (which isn’t wonderful).
Some of the more intersting pages are:
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Disambiguation in Folksonomies
On this page I’m showing ads for Python books, while AdSense is showing Expert Systems (and software radio !?!).
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I’m showing ads for “tv dreams”, while AdSense is showing a mixture of generic blog ads and millionare ads (?).
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This posting is about a hedge fund run by Nassim Taleb. AdSense shows ads for Hedge Funds, while I’m showing ads for “taleb market”, which does show Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
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AdSense is showing blog ads (again), while I’m showing books on “Java Security”.
Needless to say there are plenty of reasons for these results (not least the fact that Google has a much bigger inventory than just using Amazon can supply). Anyway, I’m fairly pleased with the results. Now all I need is for millions of people to decide to buy books through those links…