Ask YC: I just quit Microsoft to work on this product full-time. What's your brutal feedback?

http://www.emptyspaceads.com

by arooni • 18 years ago

32 75 18 years ago

arooni28• 18 years ago

I'm the only founder... so far ;P. I'd love your honestly brutal feedback about the website, the product, the idea, or anything else you have to say. I have come to respect this forum and and I'd really like to hear your thoughts.

Also for all you hackers on freenode that would like to have a discussion, but can't be bothered with HTML forms, I've set up an IRC channel to discuss: #emptyspaceads (my nick is arooni).

davidw2• 18 years ago

( Public service announcement: some of us hang out on freenode's #startups )

mixmax3• 18 years ago

Interesting idea - I like the fact that you don't mess with a sites design in order to serve ads. That said I think that your success will largely depend on the clickthrough rate - which is what customers pay for at the end of the day. And in this respect you might have a disadvantage, since visitors don't see your ads before they hover over an empty area.

Also you should watch out for your brand - there have been many examples of obnoxious ad models that tend to turn people off. A good way to nurture the brand is to serve relevant ads, and in this regard of course you have a formidable competitor in Google.

The reason Google is doing so well is exactly because they are non-obtrusive and relevent.

I would work hard with the non-obtrusivenss, and think about how you can serve up relevant ads. The last one is of course extremely difficult for a startup because you need a lot of data, a lot of customers and somebody with a good knack of algorithms.

But all the best of luck :-)

Just thoughts off the top of my head....

arooni28• 18 years ago

These are great points mixmax, thanks for your feedback. A couple notes:

* We've been seeing click through of 5-20X times higher comparing existing ad units on http://www.phonemyphone.com with the same ad unit delivered in an emptyspacead. So far so good :P.

* About the relevancy of ads we serve: First off, we're not an ad network. We do work with ad networks to serve their ad units in website's empty space. Secondly the publisher is free to create their own text and image ads as well as ShoppingAds which can be keyword targeted to the site's content.

* The core of the product is the patent pending ad format we've developed. I think finding a bunch of advertisers and serving relevant ads is a hard problem I'd rather let others solve. Hats off to the folks at AdPinion (http://www.adpinion.com) for being the YC company to step up and do this.

mixmax3• 18 years ago

> "We've been seeing click through of 5-20X times higher..." hey that's great :-) I think that monitoring, A/B split tests and continually pondering on the data to find out how you get better click throughs is paramount to your business, after all that's where the money is. And without money there is no business...

> "About the relevancy of ads we serve" - I missed that one ;-) But I think that it is definitely the right decision to focus on what you do well, and do only that. Especially if you are only one founder and thus have limited resources.

A word about patents. I have done two startups, both based on patents I have. One of the things I would have done differently is to not focus so much on the technology that we happened to have a patent on, but go where the market leads. It is easy to become thrilled by a patent, but in my experience the only ones that care about it are investors. It's a great thing to have, but don't base your business on it. Just saying this because I noticed you mentioned it a few times in the comments.

dawnerd2• 18 years ago

I love the site design. Although I think the idea of any ad that just pops up like those do are very annoying. From your demo though they don't seem so. If you can get some ads for various games, let me know and I will sign up. I am launching a game review site soon and the only way I can put ads on the site without ruining the design is in the margins.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks very much for your feedback dawnerd!

We can definitely hook you up with ads for various games. Check out http://www.shoppingads.com one of the first ad networks we support. They're an eBay super affiliate and operate as an ad network. The bottom line is you can copy and paste their ad code into one of our forms and serve ads for video games for sale on eBay within your site's empty space. We offer a 50/50 split with publishers for this type of ad (we call it a NetworkAd). Please find my contact information in my YC profile, I'd be more than happy to assist you, feature you on our blog, and our home page when you launch.

dawnerd2• 18 years ago

I made an account and will be getting in touch with you tomorrow if I'm in the office. I think your product is worth a shot.

dfranke3• 18 years ago

I don't have Flash, so I can't use your demo, but I think I get the gist of it anyway. I'm wary of the placement options other than "fixed". I have no tolerance for ads that do anything to cause my eyes to jump away from text -- this generally includes moving around the page or changing color balance from one animation frame to the next. Whenever I see one, I'll hit the back button and never come back. Most people have more patience with this sort of thing than I do, but I'd still urge caution.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback dfranke.

You actually don't need flash to run our demo, the ads are already appearing on that page (provided you have javascript enabled). The flash demo is only to help walk you through what triggers the ad appearing and disappearing. We tried to make the ads as pleasing as possible and ridiculously easy to get rid of (hit the X, shake your mouse, or hit the escape key on your keyboard). I'd be interested in seeing what you think of them. Example: http://www.phonemyphone.com.

dfranke3• 18 years ago

Yes, there are several things that set me off here:

1. Whatever network you're serving the image ads from is already in my blacklist, so I just get the loading indicator. The indicator animation is irritating.

2. Get rid of the fade-out animations. Just have it disappear.

3. Any event that fires on mouse movement is evil. Re-position the ad on page-up/page-down instead.

davidw2• 18 years ago

How is this different from other ad systems? My first impression is something along the lines of "I have adsense, what's different about this?".

It was a little bit slow loading this:

http://www.emptyspaceads.com/websites/preview_url?website%5B...

But 'try it with my web page' is definitely a compelling feature!

arooni28• 18 years ago

Great question davidw.

The basic idea is your site along with every other website has some amount of empty space which you're likely not making any money from.

So basically our value proposition is: "don't give up any existing ad units you're using, let us help you make revenue from the real estate you didn't know you even had." Eventually we'd like to have close integration with AdSense so we can serve your AdSense units in your site's empty space. Finally today, you can create TextAds and ImageAds that drive users to pages you monetize well or that you'd like to promote. For you perhaps its: http://www.dedasys.com/about.html. For others its a RSS subscription link or the "buy a t-shirt page".

thingsilearned2• 18 years ago

I really like the idea. Seems to make adding adds very simple. The demo is really cool.

Your largest benefit is that you make it easier to put up adds. Your UI should reflect that. There are too many words on your site. I didn't read any of them and I won't until there are ridiculously few to read.

Also, put that awesome demo as the front page. The front page needs to draw them in. Just say "Put in your blog to see what it'd look like with emptyspace adds" and then a submit box.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Wow really good feedback thingsilearned. What did you like about the demo? The customization of the ad format that you could do? The flash portion?

thingsilearned2• 18 years ago

I guess I didn't find those parts of the demo. I just went to the "Learn More" page and put my url in. It showed my old blog.

http://www.emptyspaceads.com/websites/preview_url?website%5B...

I thought that was really awesome, where do I sign up? It would be great if somewhere in those adds you had a "Sign up" or "embed the adds". It would then bring me to a page, where I give you my email, you give me the js to embed, and the whole transaction is done. (Other than a month later when you email me telling me you need my account info because you have $20 for me).

wastedbrains• 18 years ago

yeah the simplicity of trying it out on any site via your demo is really great. I think your conversion rate of people checking out your site will be a lot higher than for places like Text-Link-Ads, good luck

rms3• 18 years ago

Best startup I've seen on here in a while. The ads didn't show up for me in Firefox 3 on Linux but they worked in Opera.

Also, do you have any publishers yet?

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks very much for your feedback rms. I need to check out FF3 issues as I've heard that issue come up before.

We do have a few publishers already on board including: http://digitalpayag.blogsome.com/, http://fslayouts.us.to/, and http://www.phonemyphone.com (if you count me :P). In addition, we've had an article written about us: http://www.howtotuts.com/2008/02/01/how-to-place-ads-in-the-...

We haven't really started marketing the product yet (that's tomorrow). I wanted to post to Hacker News before and get all of your feedback before the big marketing push (to work out any kinks in advance).

rms3• 18 years ago

It was my adblocker; FF3 works just fine...

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

You should really investigate the FF issues... I'm on 2.0.11 and had major issues with the demo.

Other than that, good luck to you... I echo most of what already been said.

Zak• 18 years ago

First, I think it's important to note that empty space in a design does have a purpose, and putting ads in it can detract from the design. If the ad clashes, it's extremely jarring from a design perspective. Several of the design articles posted here recently make note of the importance of whitespace.

Second, I tested showing ads on news.ycombinator.com, and it partially covered the login link with an ad. I'm using Firefox 2 on Linux.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Zak you're totally right. This product isn't for every one. I was trying to strike a balance where website designers could maintain the beautiful aesthetic they worked so hard to create but also allow website owners to monetize the 20-40% of real estate that most didn't know they had. However if the user keeps their mouse over content the ads shouldn't appear (but we're not perfect :P).

Lastly, we have two detection modes: "Automatic" and "Let Me Decide". The current preview features is set up to use the former. However, you can choose the latter and explicitly lay out the divs you want the ads to appear in by simply adding the "ESAemptyspace" class attribute. Once you do this, we'll make sure the ads only ever appear within those divs. We think we do a decent job of finding your site's empty space, but we know you the website owner can do the best job.

gregwebs• 18 years ago

It seems you are assuming a white background- the background should match the color the add is placed at. For my preview, the add was placed partially in actual empty space and partially on empty space that had a background image.

eusman2• 18 years ago

i find interesting that your other site phonemyphone.com is not using your own ads

arooni28• 18 years ago

But we are :P. If you move your mouse to phonemyphone's emptyspace, you'll see the ads appear. We've been running them for months and I just checked again a few minutes ago (still see them).

Note, if you had Firefox's Ad Blocker installed, you will not see them :(.

eusman2• 18 years ago

oh sorry, i just realised that the window of offscreen, so i didnt see them

dejb• 18 years ago

For me your demo had an ad appearing over the content on http://www.guitarsite.com and the ad blinked on and of a few times. Nice idea though especially for those looking to monetize a site without a lot of hassle, as long as the your ads are easy to install.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback dejb. As called out in the thread, you can specify your site's own empty space by adding the class attribute "ESAemptyspace" to elements you'd like the ads to appear in. On our part, we'll make sure to only place the ads within these elements. In our preview feature you used, we use our "Automatic" detection, but if you were to sign up with us, you could try out the "Let Me Decide" detection. Please let me know

utnick• 18 years ago

this is the best startup i've ever seen in an AskYC. Congrats.

I will be looking you up in a few weeks when I launch.

arooni28• 18 years ago

utnick, I'm honored, thanks for taking the time to look at our product. I'd be happy to help you out in any way that I can. Please see my contact information in my Hacker News profile.

tyohn• 18 years ago

I like the site and concept. My 2cents: Some of the graphics need tweeked - like the go button and the hot callout bubble are a little cheesy. I am guessing the ad creator/publisher will be able to choose the border color - so I won't go there. Will the advertisers be able to create Flash ads? I agree with mixmax; I think the ads should be relevant to the content of the site. I noticed that your the only founder; since you know what your doing from a programming point of view, I'd look for a co-founder who has a design background. Once again I like what you are doing.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback tyohn. Flash ads are an interesting format and I'll definitely add it to Trac as a future release. We'd like to support all manners of ads to allow you, the website owner to customize the ads to your needs.

dkokelley2• 18 years ago

I agree with the co founder point, if only to increase your chances of being accepted if/when you apply to YC for funding.

raju• 18 years ago

arooni: Great website, and a good idea IMO. I think most of what came to me was covered in other comments, and this may sound offhand, but I went to see your demo, then hit the back button and saw this "Code corrupted. Insert fresh copy" at the top right hand corner. I am probably nitpicking, but it caught my eye, so I figured I would drop in a comment.

Good luck. Great idea. I might consider it for my app too...

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback raju. I've never seen that bug before and thanks very much for calling it to my attention, I'll investigate. Please don't hesitate to contact me via my Hacker News profile regarding using our product on your site. I'd love to see how we can help you.

iamelgringo2• 18 years ago

Overall, I really like your idea of using whitespace to serve ads. I'd much rather offer those on my site than other types of ads. I think the over all concept works. If you study animation and motion desing, you realize that a viewer's eye is attracted by motion in an image. So, I think that it's a good idea, to have the slow fade in/fade out on the ads. It's not jarring, and abusive, I like that. Another strength is that the ad fades in beside the user's mouse cursor. So the user's eyes are probably looking at that part of the screen to begin with. Because of that, I suspect that you will continue to have better than average conversion rates. Congrats.

Constructive criticism:

Logo: From a design perspecive, it seems a little cramped between the "pt" in empty and the angle of the thought bubble. I'd like a little more space there, and perhapse angle the balloon a little bit, so it is lower below the "pt" and higher beside the "ds" in "spaceads". Just a thought. I think the logo is a good start, but it could use a little more work.

Company Name: In the design world, the term "white space" is used to describe what you're calling "empty space". If you're going after designers, that might be a plus. I don't know if you've done any domain name searches involving "white space", but at least to me, it would be a clearer explanation of what your company is doing than "empty space".

Front page design: Over all, I like the color scheme. However, the white on orange, "Sign up Now" and "Learn More," buttons are hard to read.

Front page copy: I had a couple of issues. The phrase, "Publishers turn your site's empty space into cash money" is a little problematic for me. The term "Publisher" communicates to me a magazine or book publisher, not a blogger or content creator. Those are your target demographic, I'd make it obvious I'm referring to them on my front page.

Also, the phrase, "cash money" is redundant and bugs me a bit. Copy like that is used in payday loan services or used car sales. It cheapens the service in my mind. I'd think that, "Bloggers. Change your site's blank space into cash." or something along those lines would be stronger copy.

Demo page: I didn't really like the quality of the ads that were served in the demo. It appears that you're using live ads from your ad network. I'd rather see something well designed rather than what comes in randomly off the ad network. I think that you'd get people's attention a bit easier. My first impression when I look at your site, is this: "Wow, looks pretty good." My first impression when I look at the demo ads is: "Huh??? What is that picture of? Oh, it's an ad for a hand bag... I think." The images that I saw on several re-loads were small and pixelated and frankly, I was turned off. I know that you might not have a lot of control over that, because you're only working with one ad affiliate. But for your demo, I'd make a different choice.

Demo page design: Just a simple thing, but my eye was attracted to the bright green in the pie chart first. That's not the most important part of your demo. It was a little distracting for me.

Again, I'm not trying to nit pick. I'm tryin to give what was asked for: an honest critique. Over all, I think that you're well on your way. Good job, and you're off to a great start. Keep it up.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for your feedback imagelgringo; this was very valuable. Please ping me (from my YC Profile Info) if you'd like to discuss running the ads... I'd love to see if we can help you out.

This was some of the best feedback I've read in this thread. Thanks for taking the time.

iamelgringo2• 18 years ago

Any time. I'm concentrating on finishing school right now. So, maybe we'll talk in 6 months or so. Keep up the good work.

pchivers• 18 years ago

Yep, I agree with the suggestion to remove the term "cash money". Makes me think of a bad hip hop video--remember the Cash Money Millionaires? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_Money_Millionaires)

yters• 18 years ago

Is there another kind of money?

kashif2• 18 years ago

I find it interesting although your current implementation may not be 'sticky' over time. Best of luck :)

kashif2• 18 years ago

One more thought...On your website the design is very clean but the ads appear jarring, maybe you could do something so that they blend with client websites better.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Great comment. The ads we show on your site are ones we pick but as the website owner you get to control what's inside the ads that appear on your site. For the purposes of a preview, I had to pick some types and styles of ads, and unfortunately, not everyone will like them :P.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback kashif. Can you please elaborate what you mean by "sticky"?

simianstyle• 18 years ago

may the force be with you

hhm3• 18 years ago

Ads appear in my firefox when you enter the Flash applet too, not only on blank space.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback hhm.

So perhaps the demo page is too confusing. The ads are supposed to show up in the demo page when you move your mouse to the empty space of the site (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/about/demo). Could you please elaborate on your comment?

hhm3• 18 years ago

If I move the mouse into the empty space in the page, it shows me ads. That's ok. The problem is that it also shows me ads when I move the mouse into a Flash applet (I guess the program fails to detect that as content).

dkokelley2• 18 years ago

You seem to be getting a lot of technical and user oriented feedback, so I won't bother you with even more of this. From a marketing standpoint however, I feel I can provide some advice.

The benefit of your service is the unique compromise between site design and monetization. The current solution (adsense et all) detracts from the design of the site and is an unfortunate compromise that site admins must make in order to be profitable. Your product gives me, and all prospective customers a beautiful site without ugly ads carved out of the site's design. Quite simply, we can have our cake and eat it too, or translated: we can have a beautiful site and still run ads.

Most of the literature on your site refers to running ads in the "emtpy space" on a prospective user's site. It took me about 5-10 minutes to figure out the true value of the site, the "Hey! Now I know what this could do for me!" and I come from a more technical background. Other bloggers and site owners may barely have a working knowledge of their site, and to them, I would think that the message they would perceive is "Fill up all the empty space in your website!" which hides your true value.

"Have your cake and eat it too!" - I think stressing this point in your site's literature will serve you much better than "Monetize your website's empty space"

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for your feedback dkokelley. I'll see if I can incorporate the message of not having to sacrifice your site's beautiful design to run emptyspaceads.

nkohari• 18 years ago

I like it. The idea has some good potential. Odd timing, I just read this on Mashable. Looks like a potential competitor with a slightly different take:

http://mashable.com/2008/02/07/adcamo/

arooni28• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback nkohari. I'm happy to hear about AdCamo, it means that the space I've gone into is valid (with the entrance of competitors).

stener• 18 years ago

It distracts me more from actual content than integrated ads- the pop-up effect is horrible. Your ads care more about site owners than visitors.

shawndrost• 18 years ago

Hey arooni - there are some places within the "close" icon that aren't active (clicks are registered as ad clicks). Also, there's lots of flicker on your demo page (win xp / ff 2.0.0.11). Actually, it looks like your demo page is still under development, there are some other problems with it. Also, your photo on the "team" page is really dark.

Good idea. I don't like the name; can you emphasize "clean" rather than "empty" or something? cleanads.com was my first idea.

arooni28• 18 years ago

shawndrost: Thanks I've verified the bug regarding accidentally counting clicks and will look into it. Can you elaborate on flickering? I've tested with your same setup some days ago and had no issues. Or just ping me privately through my Hacker News profile.

Fuca• 18 years ago

There is a lot of money in that market, good luck

I think the bottom line is us (publishers), use Google ads because we want to be in good terms with whoever is bringing the people, if you work around that you will make it big.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

The demo failed on my personal site (http://michaelhartl.com/) by trying to serve ads on the left of the page, thereby obscuring ~1/3 of the content.

arooni28• 18 years ago

Again, we have two detection options, "Automatic" which is what the demo is using in addition to "Let Me Decide" where you can specify the HTML elements that you'd like the ads to appear in by simply adding the "ESAemptyspace" class attribute to the elements you'd like (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/publisher/customization_options).

For the purpose of the demo, we use the Automatic detection method... but if you signed up as a publisher with us, you could get the fine grain control that you desire.

mhartl2• 18 years ago

Good to know. I suggest indicating that prominently somewhere, lest potential customers reject your product on spurious grounds (as I appear to have done :-).

mburns• 18 years ago

Your demo app with my blog had some disturbing results. The google ads that normally appear were covered over by one of your ads AS WELL AS a second ad that would appear when my mouse was in the empty space.

I like the idea of empty space ads, you have a good service, but I won't deploy it on my sites if you are going to be overwriting parts of my page. Lets hope this was some ill-advised feature of the demo, and not actually production system behavior...

Screenshot: http://mirwin.net/images/emptyspacead.png

arooni28• 18 years ago

I'm 99.99% sure it's the demo code. You see we pull down all the HTML + CSS from your site and insert a bit of our javascript code to your site when we show the ads. This could cause some irregularities of the ads appearing as you mention.

In fact I just previewed your website (http://www.emptyspaceads.com/websites/preview_url?website%5B...) and while I do see the ads appearing sometimes over AdSense (because we're using the snap to margins behavior) I don't see them replacing the AdSense ads as you mention. What is your OS/Browser?

And finally, I absolutely need to put a disclaimer that lets you know as a user you can specify the divs that you consider empty space (the "Let Me Decide" option) by adding the class ID attribute "ESAemptyspace" to any HTML elements you'd like the ads to appear in. On our part, we'll be sure to ensure that the ads only ever appear within those elements. The valid issues you're bringing up could be mitigated with this option.

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I just quit Microsoft to work on this product full-time. What's your brutal feedback? ..."

Show through demonstration. Well thought out, flawlessly executed in an area that will no doubt have the potential to make bucket loads of cash.

But there are a few problems I can think of. The first is the market for adverts is dominated by a giant. But where there is competition there is potential for success. The other problem is images + javascript can be blocked through code [0] and by humans. [1] Those clever lads at google get around this using text. Text fools code blocking and to some extent humans. So the technique you use will be less effective than googles technology. What other technology is behind the advert engine. How for instance does it target individuals?

   Q What do we really need?

Maybe it's a little bit idealistic but for me I just want to make things that users want [3] and try to make their day a little easier and helping them instead of bombarding them. Reducing the amount of useless information and noise. Linda Stone poses the question(s), "what do we really need, and what do we need to pay attention to". And your system is something I think does not really benefit the consumers full stop. Microsoft thinking at it's best.

  Q What do we need to pay attention to?

I'm sure advertising will be a hit for creators, synthesisers. But is this the right question?

[0] http://noscript.net/ for example ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089864/ and humans if http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2250089862/ you see the distinctive shape.

[1] "Is Navigation Useful?", '... users rarely look at logos, mission statements, slogans, or any other elements they consider fluff (in particular, they ignore advertising and anything that looks like an ad) ...' ~ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000109.html

[2] "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers" , '100% are consumers, 10% active synthesizers & 1% creators'~ http://www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5

[3] "Linda Stone", 'Continuous partial attention' ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail739.html

Ask YC: I just quit Microsoft to work on this product full-time. What's your brutal feedback?

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