[OSM-talk] Advertising on OSM?

[John McKerrell]

On 5 Jan 2007, at 19:49, Jochen Topf wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 07:11:31PM +0100, Lars Aronsson wrote:
>>
>> Is there any way (with AJAX?) we could present "Linköping" in text
>> in that HTML page, and make that text change as the user zooms and
>> pans?  Perhaps a simple HTML reload with new static text after a
>> certain distance of pan&zoom and some delay?
>>
>> If we could solve this problem, we could get more relevant ads and
>> probably pull in more money.  As we continue to add more
>> placenames to our maps, the ads would only get better.
>
> That is not going to work. Google only looks at the page occasionally
> and can't cope with dynamic content.  Google doesn't pull in the page
> each time somebody looks at it to figure out the right adwords. That
> would immediately double your load on the server when for every  
> request
> from somebody you'll get another one.
>

How about pages with URL arguments? I imagine it would be possible to  
knock up something that did a query on the database based on the lat/ 
lon that was passed in, then return the placenames near to that lat  
lon, or contained in the bounds of the map, I imagine with some  
fairly simple optimisations, like preparing a simple database of  
placenames that was only updated once a week, it would be possible to  
make this quite speedy.

If this isn't possible, then as others have mentioned, adding a  
paragraph of text with a better description could help.

> If we want location-aware ads, then we probably have to roll our  
> own. Or
> maybe some advertising service can cope with that.
>
> I'd suggest getting rid of the Google Ads as they don't bring enough
> money. At the moment there are not enough people looking at the pages
> anyway. At some point I think some kind of affiliate program could be
> started (but then OSM would need some sales people!).
>

I don't find them much of a problem personally, and I'd be surprised  
if it was these adverts that led to the problems mentioned in the  
letter. One thing I'd quite like is to have the server remember my  
login between browser sessions, and if it did that I'd be much less  
likely to see them. Also if the server ever gets slashdotted it would  
be nice to think we might get some money out of it.

John