Personal
BlogSnob
Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 21 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.
15 Oct 2003
I’ve purchased BlogSnob from idya Research. For those that aren’t familiar, BlogSnob is a free advertising exchange for blogs and personal sites. You show small text ads on your site and in turn your ad appears on the other sites in the network.
I’ve been running the Textad Exchange for about two years now and I’ve always had plans to improve it, add features, and make it better. The ad server behind it is fairly full-featured, and I’ve wanted to extend it to offer more services. The purchase of BlogSnob will give me a much larger member base, some features that I didn’t have before, and market share.
Arnab approached me early this summer and asked if I’d be interested in buying BlogSnob. My first challenge was figuring out how the service could earn money. More on that later. My next challenge was decide how this would fit into my overall company strategy.
Since I’ve wanted to improve my ad server anyway, I’ve decided to launch a new service called SimpleAds. Right now SimpleAds consists of only BlogSnob, but that’s going to change. First will come integration of the TextAd Exchange. Later I plan on adding other advertising tools and services.
There are some other plans as well, but it’s a little soon to talk about those. Most of them are in the early stages, but as I implement this new strategy, I’ll discuss everything here, of course.