the people who make blogger have created pyrads. billed as “web advertising that doesn’t suck” it’s a micro advertising management system. this is the type of text ad being used successfully at google and metafilter. what’s good about pyrads is that it looks as if it’s going to be an extensible system usable by other sites.

i disagree that all other web advertising sucks, i think it’s a matter of targeting the right people. we get exceedingly good click through rates at loquax by showing adverts to people who are interested in their content. we do however see a much better response to adverts in text form than to graphic adverts. i think that, on the whole, people just tend to ignore most graphics on the web.

one of the really good things about these new micro systems is that they allow small sites to carry out small campaigns with minimal effort. the only thing that concerns me is that there isn’t yet the ability to target ads. the google system is successful mainly because it shows you adverts that you want to see and not just because those ads are small and unobtrusive.