A new and exclusive online advertising approach
Was browsing the web looking for some decent PPC websites out there and came across this, bointer.net.
The site’s interesting design “hooked” me immediately after which I started reading what it’s about.
Apparently it is an advertising system that allows everyone that has an internet connection to create and receive ads. Nothing new so far, except for the fact that ads are displayed only if you download and use their client, which will make ads pop under your mouse cursor and attached to it.
I downloaded and scanned that client with every antivirus I could and after it came out clean, I installed it.
From what I’ve seen, the ad box has around 200ish resolution and it looks “OK” (in the sense that it is eye catching but not annoying) and the ad format resembles traditional advertising (google adsense text ads) but also has support for image based ads (animated Gif’s aswell).
You can interact with the ad box by pressing and holding down the Ctrl Key, to click on the ad link or to stop the ad in place since it’s on a limited duration.
Apparently you get payed for for every ad you see using their client and you get a little extra if you access the link from the ad (if it has any). The advantage to this type of advertising is that you don’t need to be online, you just have to have a connection to the web ( or so the developers say), but personally what I found more interesting is it’s other 2 traits that they underline, exclusiveness (which is always good in advertising) and the fact that it is attached to your mouse pointer which increased the user’s focus area by a lot.
I have to admit that I’ve had a couple of ads pop up and I couldn’t miss them.
I dug into it’s ad creation menu a bit aswell and it has some advanced features for targeted ads, like countries, regions number of views per user and time of start/end for the ad along with an advanced log history menu, that gives you detailed data about when you ads were clicked, viewed, when and by which IP address.
They seem to have a small and steady community going on, the admins and moderators are very responsive and the website and forums are also updated once every few days. Also, don’t be fooled by their front page banner, they have over 2300 members at the time of writing this article, while their banner indicates only 1558. That is only because it doesn’t count the registered users, but their “valid” users, that is… the persons that registered, downloaded and used their bointer client at least once (taken from their blog entry here http://bointer.net/blog/en/archives/58 ).
They have been up on the web for only a couple of months it seems and the only things I can say I don’t like about it is that the website, even though it has english support and it is updated regularly, hasn’t seen that much advertising, internationally.
Well best of luck to them, I personally like the idea and I hope they pull it through.
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