Since blogs have been dying down on the site due to the busy school year I decided to take some time out every so often to feature developer blogs to help give you an inside look of what's happening as well as to gather my thoughts. I'm by far a professional writer, so bare with any grammatical errors you may find.

 

There have been a lot of changes to the site over the last few days with API integration such as with twitter and tumblr. With the change in ad partners there has been a noticeable decrease in ad revenue for the site as well as quality. 

 

The biggest issue with ads at the moment is they are text only and don't entice users. Another issue is when we did have image ads the ads were often not related to the site at all. This is why I'm currently looking into replacing ads with amazon ad units. Now, let me explain what that means. In reality there is no such thing as an "amazon ad unit." 

 

Amazon offers a few widgets you can place on the site but they aren't really advertisements and they don't follow standard ad formatting. What amazon does offer is a powerful API that allows you to obtain a ton of information from their database and perform specific keyword searches. An example being a search for anime under the DVD category. 

 

When you obtain these results you're then able to create a link that will send the user to amazon to purchase the item. A small percentage of all sales then gets return as revenue for the site. The pay system is a bit more complex, but that's the general idea.

 

So what is the advantage of using an API to create your own advertisements? You can customize ads to look anyway you went and even create dynamic content. Such as having expandable ad units. Other options include the ability to specify items. A good example is in the long term of the site an anime company could offer to pay to have their product advertised on the site that they sell on amazon. By doing that they can simply provide their amazon product ID that will then be automatically used to generate a custom ad. 

 

Other features that can occur in the future is searching for specific genre's based on a user's interest. If a user likes a lot of horror anime, it's possible to do a search for horror anime based on the user's interest. If a user is on the database looking up an anime title such as Spirited Away, they may see an advertisement to purchase the DVD. As well specifics on product discounts can be shown to entice users on great deals they may not have otherwise have known

 

It's a fairly simple API to use and the majority of the code will be completed using JavaScript. What will happen is the server will create a unique link that will only be usable for a short time and cannot be created again. Because of this it's possible to create a very lite weight tool that requires minimal server side code.

 

I'm hoping to have the code library completed fairly soon and then I'll just need to create the ad units and JavaScript code. For now here's a dirty example of an ad!

 

 

Until next time!

Nyo