Payback: A Blogvertising Standard - Preliminary

Payback is an open standard for displaying ads that make you money when visitors view pages based on your content. The standard defines "blogvertising" tags that can be added to newsfeeds to indicate your ad preferences.

How Payback Works

• Edit your RSS feed to include a few new Channel elements. The new Blogvertising elements indicate what your preferred ad source is, your id with the ad source, and an optional tracking category. Google Adsense users would need to know their adsense ID.
• Create your content like you always do.
• Directories and aggregators that parse and display information from your feed see the Blogvertising tags, and generate web pages (or other content) with your Blogvertising codes embedded in them.
• Visitors view the page, and the browser displays your ads. Ka-ching!

We feel that by letting you earn some money, however small, from the fact that our site exists, it will encourage you to support our site and other Payback sites over sites that want to take advantage of you.

Why Payback is Cool

It takes a lot of work to create a great blog or podcast. Payback provides a way for sites that use your news to help support your work. It also encourages you to link to and support the sites that implement Payback, because they make you money. Everybody wins.

Another nice feature of this approach is that no business relationship needs to be setup, so you don't have to give up your bank info, sign contracts, etc. This should make it easy to scale the system up to thousands of content suppliers, and large numbers of aggregators and directories.

This is an open standard that any other site can implement. This means that if you support the standard and sites that implement it, there should soon be a pool of sites that are helping you generate revenue.

The Gory Details

Payback is based on an extension to the RSS 2.0 standard, authored by developer and seminal blogger/podcaster Dave Winer. RSS 2.0 allows for extensions which let you add additional elements to RSS to expand its usefulness. This lets RSS be flexible, while keeping the base standard simple.

Extensions are defined using a namespace. The namespace indicates where these new feed elements come from, and what they mean. The namespace for Payback is blogvertising, and the documentation is at http://www.podcastingnews.com/blogvertising/. This is indicated in the news feed like this:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:blogvertising="http://www.podcastingnews.com/blogvertising/" >

Within the blogvertising namespace, we're suggesting three elements:

• blogvertising:adsource - this indicates who your preferred ad supplier is, ie Google Adsense
• blogvertising:adCode - this is your ID at your ad supplier. This is what gets you paid. For Adsense, Google gives you an Ad Client number.
• blogvertising:adChannel - this is optional. Some advertisers let you create advertising channels, so you can keep track of how much revenue you make from various ad locations.

Here's an example of what these additions could look like:

<blogvertising:adSource>GoogleAdsense</blogvertising:adsource>
<blogvertising:adCode>1544565498445</blogvertising:adCode>
<blogvertising:adChannel>PodcastingNews</blogvertising:adChannel>

The items in red are what are required to implement this. The blogvertising:adChannel element will require additional discussion to determine the best way of using it. When an aggregator or directory sees these tags in a RSS feed, it can use them to generate appropriate ad code so that your ads are shown in the visitor's browser.

The term Payback is a trademark of Podcasting News when used in the context of advertising within blogs and podcasts. It's open to be freely used by anyone, though. We are just pre-emptively trademarking it, so that it won't be co-opted for commercial purposes.

FAQ

Q: What do I have to do if I want to try this?

A: Currently, you need to be using RSS 2.0, be able to edit your feed, and have an Adsense account. Just edit your news feed or feed template to include the codes listed above. We'll have a reference implementation up soon that lets you verify that your ads are showing up correctly.

Q: How can I support sites that feature Payback?

A: You can link to them.

Q: How much money will I make?

A: Probably not much at first. If your podcast or blog generates interest, though, you'll be rewarded for supporting sites that have implemented Payback. As more sites add Payback, you'll have more and more opportunities to make money.

Q: What if a site doesn't implement Payback, and they just want to make money off of me.

A: Support sites that treat you fairly, and this should put pressure on other sites to do the same.

Q: Does Payback create a business relationship between me and the sites that implement it?

A: No. By participating in Payback blogvertising, you're not entering into a business relationship with the sites that implement it. You don't need to fill out any forms or provide Payback sites with personal information to make this work.

• You put in the codes.
• Ads are delivered from your chosen ad source to the user's browser
• The Payback site does not control your content or your ads' content.
• Your ads are only displayed if you opt to add the necessary codes.

Q: Does Payback support Amazon ads or other ad suppliers?

A: At this point, we've only implemented Adsense. Because this is an open standard, anyone can create implementations for other ad sources. We may add information for implementing other ad sources if there is community interest.

Q: How do I set this up in Movable Type?

A: Instructions to come

Q: Does this work with Atom, or RSS 3.14159?

A: Payback is built on the RSS 2.0 standard, because it is the defacto standard in the podcast world. Other implementations may be possible. This can be discussed in the forum.