Manage revenue share on multi-author blogs – ads per author
A trendy feature request was to allow a revenue share with authors. For example, on an ad position within posts, you could show the author’s ad 20% of the time and 80% of the ads from the publisher. This would allow authors to earn more from successful posts and motivate them to create more attention to their content.
After thinking about this for a while, I decided against adding a specific feature, especially since version 1.7 of Advanced Ads has a display condition that allows displaying ads only on posts from a particular author.
Create ad units
Contents
The easiest solution for a revenue share with authors would be to create ad units for each author. These ads could either be from your own ad networks (AdSense, or whatever program you are using) or you could get the ads from your authors, in case they have their own accounts.
You also need to create the ads that show up for your account.
In order to attach a specific ad to an author, you must use the Author Display Condition. Once you added it in the Display Conditions meta box, you can select the author to which this ad “belongs”. This will make sure, that the ad will only show up on posts where this user is the author.
This ad would show only on posts written by Thomas
Create a group
Now, create a new ad group from the random type. You might name it by the author. Assign the author’s ad and your own ad to this group. Make sure that the ad weight is set up accordingly. For a 20:80 share you would choose 2 for the author’s ad and 8 for your own. 1:4 would work too.
Implement the group
The last step is to implement the group.
If you have multiple authors and want to display the ad on the same spot, you need to use a little trick.
Create another ad for each group. This ad should also have the author display condition set, be of the Rich Content type and only the shortcode of that group in the text field.
Now, create a meta group with all these intermediate ads in it and place it whereever you want.
Starting in 2009, Thomas’ own word game website grew to 40 MM page impressions per month. He then built Advanced Ads to help his colleagues to place ads and test different ad positions and networks tests without any coding skills. Thomas now enjoys improving the product for our more than 150,000 users worldwide.
