Target specific IP ranges with ads?

January 15, 2008 6:43 AM

Is there a major online advertising network that allows targeting of specific IP ranges like those assigned to a company?

I'm not looking for geo-targeting that will blanket a country or a city. I want finer control. I want to be able to target these few hundred addresses with ads specifically for people who work for those companies. Some of these IP ranges are clearly on WANs with multiple on-ramps to the Internet in cities across the continent.

posted by Mo Nickels to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

There was a trojan that hit all of the IP's associated with Verizon's aircards a year or so back, exploiting an IE vulnerability, and set up a spam remailer . I know that's not exactly what your looking for but some of the principles apply. I can probably dig up some links if they would be helpful.
posted by Roach at 9:24 AM on January 15, 2008

Response by poster: No, I just want ads. It's not an attack or a harsh message or a revenge trick or anything. There are just some people that I want to blanket with an idea and this would help reinforce the idea being transmitted in other ways. I've already got the IP blocks figured out--I just need to find a way to make sure they see the ads.
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:40 AM on January 15, 2008

Openads (formerly phpAdsNew) is the standard open-source ad server tool. It can do IP-targetted delivery using wildcards.

If you've never used an ad server before there is a bit of a learning curve, and openads sometimes has buggy performance (for which it can be difficult to get support), but when it works, it works very very well.
posted by fishfucker at 10:09 AM on January 15, 2008

er, you'll have to scroll down on the page I linked, but the pertinent info is:

IP Address

You can limit the display of a banner to users that have a particular IP address. Typically, you would specify a range of IP addresses to target. You can do this in one of two ways:

1. Using wild (*) cards;
2. Using the base IP and the net mask.

Using wild cards is straightforward. For example, specify 217.205.*.* to target all IP addresses from 217.205.0.0 to 217.205.255.255.

The alternative is to enter the base IP and net mask in the following format:

217.205.0.0/255.255.0.0

This targets all IP addresses from 217.205.0.0 to 217.205.255.255. A valuable advantage in specifying a client IP address is in targeting users of a specific ISP (Internet Service Provider). ISPs are allocated blocks of contiguous IP addresses. You can target those blocks using either of the above-mentioned methods.

posted by fishfucker at 10:10 AM on January 15, 2008

major online advertising network

crap, sorry -- apparently I did not read closely enough. Well, if you want to run your own, you could use OpenAds.
posted by fishfucker at 10:11 AM on January 15, 2008

Response by poster: Running my own ad network is useless. I need a huge network that has hundreds of thousands of publishers. I want these the targeted people to see the ads in the course of their daily web browsing, wherever they are.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:34 AM on January 15, 2008

Actually, fish might have half the solution.

If the huge advertising network with hundreds of thousands of publishers can't do per-ip-block specificity, either for technical or business-related reasons (?) the only way to pull this off may be to

1) Purchase city-by-city coverage, targeted by business location
2) *Have the ad image load off of your own server*
3) Do your *own* targeting at the IP-block level, something along the lines of fish's suggestion.

Significantly more expensive but probably the only way to actually do this.

Has the added benefit that you can run a test ad first, monitor the traffic, and estimate your success rate accordingly.
posted by bhance at 7:08 PM on January 16, 2008