We’ve had crowd-sourced book reviews (Amazon), crowd-source location (Foursquare, Waze), so why not a crowd-sourced advertising network? Sounds crazy? Well the fact is display banner ads have been just a tiny bit dissappointing and basically create clutter on the real estate of the web. At the same time companies try to monetize what they do to fund free apps with these things. The answers are tricky.
So relevancy is the key – and this remains very hard. But still the banner ads come, plastering web and mobile. Google AdWords has helped but the problem is that the long tail of small businesses still finds it hard to buy banners, where campaigns can run beyond the budgets of smaller companies.
Seed backed by the France/Israel based Kima Ventures, InfluAds, a crowd-sourced ad network which doubles-down on ad placement, launches today. Its aim is to eliminate unsold and remnant inventory and removing ‘bad’ ads with good ones.
The 16 months old Copenhagen-based startup has a team in spread across Denmark and Portugal and now has 200+ publishers signed up including Venturehacks, StartupQuote and others.
The idea is that publishers (blogs, news sites, anything) work together to develop curated ad networks around their niche. The idea is to drive premium revenue per ad unit and matching multiple ad units per page.
Worth kicking the tyres on this one.
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