I've always struggled with selling advertising on this site. I have tried some things here and there but most resulted in not enough revenue for the value they detracted from my site. Selling my own ads made decent money but it has been hard to find advertisers. I'm not too fond of random Google ads that generally show unrelated products and items. Fortunately, I think I might have found a solution with YCombinator company Snaptalent.
Judging from comments on posts, a good chunk of the people that read this site are intelligent tech-savvy types. When Snaptalent approached me several weeks ago about testing out their service, I was rather skeptical and wanted to know how they were different than most ad services. I've been using Snaptalent for about two weeks and well, they've proven their worth to me. Being a startup advocate myself, most (all?) Snaptalent job ads are for interesting startups, befitting of this site's demographic.
Snaptalent Widget Management Page
Snaptalent is the only ad service I can recall that I'm not ashamed of using on my site. Snaptalent ads can be presented in a variety of ways from the traditional text only to my preferred text and images view. Rather taking users away from the site, Snaptalent ads load within the page and show off rather interesting information about the job, not just the posting. There are images of the startups as well as a video.
Example Snaptalent Job Page
Job ads seem to be the "it" thing these days with the proliferation of jobs at new startups and the best way to fill those positions is to reach out to the blogs and websites they visit anyway. Snaptalent seems to be right on track noticing this trend and building their product to take advantage of it. Currently some other prominent tech-related blogs and websites are using Snaptalent: News.YC, Steve Yegge, Raganwald.
Thoughts? Is this better than other types of advertising services online now? I think so. It's the only type of ad that I think adds value rather than detracting. When the Snaptalent crew asked me how they could improve it I said I loved it and wouldn't mind seeing some higher revenue.