Thalasar Ventures

After Shoemoney sold Auction Ads, it didn’t take long for the service to go completely to shit. I was running Auction Ads on my Bobby Orr memorabilia site.

It was running largely on auto pilot and making the occasionally sale. I was doing my usual Saturday site walkabout (where I wonder around various sites and check them out, see what is happening) when I noticed that every single Auction Ad was broken. No placeholder ad – just a broken image link in the ad. Wow. Way to fall to pieces. For an ad serving network to degrade like that on a simple term that I KNOW HAS PRODUCTS at EBAY is horrible. The Bobby Orr site pulls it’s inventory in real time from Ebay so it should simply work. Currently they are running a $25 free giveaway – which of course really isn’t a give away since you need to sell $50 worth of stuff on Ebay in order to receive the funds. Given that most small publisher will never do that in sales in a year, it’s nothing more than a poor marketing gimmick. I would spend less time signing up publishers than I would making sure you ad network actually works.
After a little digging into the issue, it appears they broke their previous ad code when updating to their new “Web 2.0” code. It’s an utterly boneheaded move. It apparently cannot do an and on simple keyword terms like “Bobby Orr”. Instead it can only support a single keyword! Ugh.