Adroll, Combining an Advertising Network with Social Networking

Jared Kopf thinks that ad networks should be more like social networks. Kopf is now CEO of Adroll, a social ad network that launched in private beta last week. The last thing the Web needs is another ad network, but Adroll is at least trying something new. It lets niche publishers self-organize into communities of interest so as to have a better shot at attracting advertisers. For instance, in the “Surfing Ad Community,” there are currently eight surf sites that collectively attract an audience of half-a-million per month. There is also an “Alt Music Community” of music blogs. Any publisher can create their own community or ask to join an existing one. Well, that’s the idea. You create your own adroll, just like a blogger would create a blogroll with other related blogs. Except that advertisers can buy ads across that blogroll. They can also buy ads across a tagroll. When publishers set up their profiles they choose tags to describe their site, like “surf,” “celebrities,” or “web 2.0.” And advertisers can buy those tags. Advertisers also have their own profiles, with their own tags. So publishers interested in attracting a certain advertiser need only look at its tags, add them to their own profile, and hope for a match. Thus, the tagrolls could end up being so easy to game as to render them useless.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/03/adroll-the-social-ad-network-beta-invites/