Let’s talk about online ads for a second. They are absolutely everywhere but most visitors don’t click on them because they are annoying, irrelevant and intrusive. While most publishers without millions of visitors get no more than a couple of bucks for perhaps a coffee. Overall, the only real winners are the companies in between, dealing the traffic and getting most of the advertisement revenue.
Influads, a Copenhagen based company is aiming to change all that by creating the worlds first completely free ad network. They have launched in 2011, got pre-seed funding from Kima Ventures and built a profitable company with over 700 publishers worldwide.
Originally, Influads created a form of a crowdsourced ad network. However, if they keep todays promise, this is bigger, much bigger. They want to cut out the middle-man completely by offering free direct sales and free marketplace sales with an ability to invoice clients directly.
To do so, publishers get an “about.me” sort of profile, where people can view the available choices and book ads directly. The platform supports Web Ads, Email Ads, RSS, Podcasts, Video and Syndication content ads.
So where is the money you might wonder? Influads hopes to gain the trust of publishers and users and then offer optional add-ons that are paid per performance. For instance, they will charge 36% for filling unsold/remnant inventory with Quality traffic, 6% for handling invoicing and payments (Unless you want to do it yourself) and 6% for doing sales on publishers behalf.
In addition to already mentioned ways in which you can published, Influads also announced that they are going to release an API through which you will be able to monetize Desktop-based apps and other mediums.
We talked to Anibal Damiao, founder and CEO of Influads about the changes and he tells us that “usually there is a fee based model. You put an ad on the marketplace and they take a fee from you. Basically, we thought if we can first allow the publisher monetize his quality traffic as much as possible by offering a free ad marketplace. ”
So basically, when there are no fees in the middle it “enables better publishers to be with us. For example Wired Magazine can be with us and pay less because they get that part for free and we will help them monetize the traffic they are unable to sell” continues Damiao.
ArcticStartup was one of the publishers of Influads before and we honestly found that the return we were getting was less than what we would get if we would sell directly. However with these new developments, it might make sense to manage the sales through Influads and the 6% for managing all the payments does not sound too bad.
Top Image Courtesy Of Shutterstock / Online Ads
