Intranet advertising?

March 14, 2009 9:07 AM

Is there a good way to sell advertising on a password-protected intranet? If so, what is it?

I develop an intranet at an advertising agency, and we've tossed around the idea of running ads on our intranet, both as an ongoing experiment in online advertising, and as a small revenue stream for an IT department that is otherwise just overhead for the agency. Ignoring the social issues for a moment (e.g. distracting employees from their work), is there any good technical solution for intranet advertising?

Anything that works like Google AdSense, spidering the site to get context for ads, is out because the site can't be accessed without a password. So that leaves either systems that determine context in real time with JavaScript, or systems that allow the publisher to choose the ads (or something else I'm not thinking of). Are there any such systems that work well enough, with enough advertisers, to be worth using?

posted by scottreynen to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Google allows you to run adsense on password protected sites, and here are the instructions on how to get the spider to log in

It seems like getting approval for the initial site without giving google access to your intranet to see what's on it may be some combination of chicken-and-egg and company ip issue, though.
posted by corprew at 11:30 AM on March 14

To clarify, the site is password-protected because we can't have anyone else accessing the content, even advertisers. And we'd only want ads that are actually relevant. So even if we could trick Google into running ads without indexing, they'd only display ads that weren't relevant to the context, so that wouldn't help.
posted by scottreynen at 12:45 PM on March 14

Imagine trying to sell this to advertisers: "Hi, we're an advertising company that would like you to pay us to read your ads. Even though we won't let you see our internal content, we assure you the ads are relevant." It just reeks of business failure or pyramid scheme.

Even in the best case scenario where someone actually believes in the endeavor and pays you to advertise to your employees, your next challenge is rolling this out as a product to other companies. Because once you prove it works for you, your boss will insist it can work for others. I don't think you can convince them that other companies will treat an idea they already approved with contempt without impugning their judgment.

I think it says something that even in '98, at the height of the New Economy and irrational exhuberance, people were skeptical was worthwhile. I think your best bet is to focus on how IT improve traditional advertising, rather than how advertising can improve traditional IT.
posted by pwnguin at 1:12 PM on March 14 [1 favorite]

Okay, so this is confirming my suspicion that no such system exists, which is fine. But I want to be clear about what I'm looking for, as I seem to have missed the mark a bit on that.

While we won't let advertisers see our content, that's only a problem on a technical level. Advertisers on Google AdSense don't generally look at published content directly, and that system works well enough. Google's code looks at the content, and the only reason that wouldn't work for us is that Google's code is run at Google (requiring the content be sent to Google). If someone wrote code that could be run entirely within our intranet (e.g. in JavaScript) to look at our content, that wouldn't be a problem.

But if no one's written such code, we're not going to write it ourselves.
posted by scottreynen at 3:29 PM on March 14

If someone wrote code that could be run entirely within our intranet (e.g. in JavaScript) to look at our content, that wouldn't be a problem.

No one writes that code because it opens the advertisers up to fraud of massive proportions. If I give you a bunch of JavaScript that you can put somewhere I can't see it, you can pretty trivially change it to do anything you want, from choosing ads that only match your intranet's color scheme to faking clicks and impressions. That code needs to be on a server controlled by the advertiser. Also they don't want to be liable if your private site that no one can see is a host of illegal content.
posted by Ookseer at 4:07 PM on March 14

I think we understand what you're looking for; the problem is that what you're looking for doesn't make sense, at least not from the "small revenue stream" perspective. You could certainly do a completely in-house ad service as an experiment, with ads for other services your department offers, or something. But how is any external system supposed to deliver contextually relevant ads if it can't know anything about the context in which the ads are to appear? Are they supposed to send you all their ads, complete with metadata so your system can determine which ads go with which pages?

Basically, what pwnguin said in his first paragraph. This is a non-starter. You could have non-contextually-relevant third-party ads, maybe, if you can find an advertiser network willing to take your word about things they'd be able to verify if they had access to your intranet. Or you could have a completely walled-off system which has access to contextual information about both the ads and the site contents, but good luck getting anyone to pay you to place ads there. (I worked for a startup during the dotcom bubble which made a product that would have been perfect for this, but it's been through a number of revamps and been sold to AOL since then, so I don't know if there's anything on the market today which would work for you.) Or you could have a system where the publisher chooses the ads, but again, good luck getting any third-party advertisers. (On preview, Ookseer has it right.)

But what you're asking for just doesn't work. And, really, would you want it to? If the ads are provided by a third-party advertising network, do you really want that company getting referer information about the structure of your intranet? Sure, you know you don't want them having access to the contents, but a lot can be inferred from just the layout and URLs.
posted by hades at 4:09 PM on March 14