Ad Mates

Imagine you and your friends have a project and a website each. You are likely to look for ways to increase the number of visitors on your site that are actually interested in your project. And you don’t want to spend a lot of money on it. Additionally, you probably don’t mind helping your friend’s projects along the way (since you have been blogging about it anyway).

Suits you? Thought so. Read on, this is for you. Ad Mates revives the old idea of web-rings (remember 1997?) and gives it a modern polish as well as fundamental change in thought. It works like this:

• You all join a group (signup is free),
• create advertisements for you projects,
• add a bit of code to your websites and
• Boom, you show each other’s ads on your sites.

So far so easy, but why is this noteworthy? Because Ad Mates is based on the idea of fair sharing. For each time your website displays an ad from your group, your ad gets shown on another group member’s site. The more ad-views you contribute to your group, the more ad-views you get back.

Does it actually work?

For sure. The idea is not mine, I just implemented it and now offer it as a service. Ad Mates is already being used by ~20 independent Mac developers who share around 7,000 ad-views per day. This is not that big, but it’s hardly a failure. The indie Mac developer scene is pretty tightly knit and they help each other out wherever they can. Also, their audience is pretty likely to be interested in other Mac software and services, too, so there’s a financial interest in using Ad Mates.

OK, I am sold

Go directly to http://admates.net/ and sign up. If you are the first of your friends, create a new group and invite them. If you need more information, have a look at the Ad Mates Q&A and News.