I think it’s a neat idea. It makes it easier for advertisers to find and buy ad space, which could potentially result in smaller publishers having their ad space filled.

If you do any advertising, or just like seeing how much publishers charge for their ad space, you can download the Chrome extension here. (And don’t forget, Webmaster-Source has BuySellAds banners…)

Yes, that means BuySellAds is coming to the iPhone and iPad. Think about that for a minute.

There are now three major ad networks available for app developers to use in their products. Apple’s own iAd, with it’s fun and user-friendly interactive mini applications; Google’s AdMob banners; and now BuySellAds. The big difference between BuySellAds and the other two is that you get final approval before an ad is displayed in your application. Also, the advertisers pay a fixed amount to run their banner for a specific stretch of time, while Apple’s and Google’s offerings cycle different banners in using an automated targeting algorithm.

Choice is good, and some developers will definitely benefit from having BuySellAds as an option.

AdPacks is an exclusive invitation-only ad network split into three topical categories. Publishers display a single ad zone that randomly cycles through the network’s banners. Advertisers pay $399-$599 to advertise network-wide and each site in the network gets a cut of the money.

The basic idea is “less is more.” Instead of bombarding users with advertisers, the advertisers pay more to be the center of attention. If their product is the only one being advertisers, there’s less to distract from the one ad.

I would love to get in on this, but I’m probably not cool enough. It seems like AdPacks would pay better as well as creating less on-screen clutter.

This is something that I have been wanting to see for some time. We have already seen a few free internet-connected applications, such as Evernote and Tweetie for Mac, supported by Fusion Ads and The Deck. It’s cool to have BuySellAds, a less exclusive network, offer a similar option to developers.

My big question is: will this work for iPhone apps? Cocoa and CocoaTouch are similar frameworks, and it would be interesting to see BuySellAds as a potential competitor to iAd and AdMob. (iAd is simply perfect for the iPhone, though. Plain banners can’t quite compete in that regard…)

Todd Garland, the founder of BuySellAds, hopes that other networks will follow suit with their own asynchronous solutions, resulting in a faster internet.

If the major ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo! Network, AOL Advertising, as well as the popular ad serving products such as Google AdManager and OpenX converted their ad code to be non-blocking, the internet as a whole would become an order of magnitude faster. I genuinely hope that the larger ad networks will step up to the plate and follow our lead on this. A faster internet is a happier internet. This is a big deal.

I’m already using the new ad code here, as are many of the sites in the BuySellAds marketplace.

As you know, we have traditionally sold display ads at fixed 30-day rates. It is important to note that we are not abandoning the sponsorship model at all, it is still our core business. However, there has been a growing need for both advertisers and publishers to have more options. Premium and Pay Per Click are the first additional options we are releasing in a series of innovative developments that we have to come.

The Pay-Per-Click ads are a type of ad zone that resembles an AdSense block vaguely, with the most noticeable difference being that the ads have icons next to them.

“Premium” banners are network ads. An advertiser can pay a minimum of $2,500 to have their banner syndicated across any sites in the BSA network that run the banners.

Payouts were not discussed in the post, as the new ad zone types are still in beta. Both of the new ad types have one major advantage though: you don’t have to worry about advertisers booking ad spots on your site, as they’re network-wide.

As a user of BuySellAds, I will be watching this with great interest.

This is because Buy Sell Ads network is now also tracking the number of times the ads themselves get requested (not just the tracking pixel). If the ads are cached on your server, then they are not going to count in your Buy Sell Ads statistics whenever it is being displayed (lowering your impression count).

The caching mechanism is being taken out currently, but in the meantime you should simply disable it.

Thaya Kareeson of Omninoggin.com has put together a great WordPress plugin to make it easier to add the BSA ad code to your site. (As if pasting a bit of JavaScript wasn’t easy enough.)

The Buy Sell Ads WordPress Plugin, once installed, allows you to insert an ad zone into your sidebar simply by dropping a widget in. For ads elsewhere, or if you don’t have a widgetized theme, you can use a template tag instead.

You can toggle some options like whether or not a placeholder ad should be displayed (recommended), and whether the ads should have nofollow attributes (also recommended). There’s also a field for editing the ad CSS.

The real unique feature is the ability to stop ad-blocking software from filtering-out the ads. The plugin caches BuySellAds’s JavaScript on your server and generates a random hash every half hour or so. The hash is used as the path to the JavaScript files, and through that and the other precautions, it’s nearly impossible to block the ads. No AdBlock subscription will catch them, and it’s certainly very hard to block them manually.

BuySellAds makes it easy to sell banner ads of all sizes on your website. They make it easy for advertisers to find you, and they handle all the dirty work that cuts into the time that would be better spent working on your site. Your ads appear in a directory alongside noteables like NETTUTS, PSDTUTS, CSS Elite, and of course, Webmaster-Source.

Advertisers can just click an “add to cart” button for each ad purchase they wish to make, then set their link URLs and upload ad creatives. Their payments are logged in your account and the ads are sent to your for review (if you so choose).

It’s so much easier than selling ads manually. No back-and-forth through email, no worrying about whether the advertiser will actually pay. It’s all quick and automated.

When you’ve accumulated a sizeable portion of money, you simply request a payout and wait for the check or PayPal transation. There is no minimum payout threshold. You can request your money whenever it pleases you.

You have plenty of flexibility when you create an ad zone. Pricing is entirely up to you, and you can set whatever you want for the banner dimensions, though it’s recommended that you use common sizes. By tweaking the “Number of Banners” and “MAX Number of Banners” fields you can easily make your ads display as a rotation, a block of rotating ads, fixed slots, whatever you want.

I’ve had nothing but good experiences with BuySellAds so far. Their support has been spectacular, and their service works well. BSA managed to sell an ad for me before I even put the ad zone code up on Webmaster-Source, and then another later that day. I was quite amazed at that.

BuySellAds is the first of a new breed of ad network. They put more control in the publishers hands, and don’t allow Flash, thus avoiding the sorts of irritants that many networks put web viewers through. They make it easier for publishers to ink deals with advertisers, they keep the bad ads out, and they pay well. Their 25% cut seems a little steep at first, but seeing as you can set your own price, and as the service works well for me, I don’t really mind it.