Implementing "Bottom of the Page"

by Vikas Kamat

First Online: March 01,2004
Page Last Updated: December 20,2007

Note: Bottom of the Page™ is a trademark of Amazon.com

If you are interested in placing text advertisements on Kamat.com, please contact us.

Introduction

After Amazon.com implemented Bottom of the Page feature showing relevant, but non-intrusive advertisements, I thought we could also add the same feature and we implemented what we then called Kamat eXtra (since the Bottom-of-the-Page name was already trademarked).

Soon after, text-advertisements became fashionable and effective and suddenly we had advertisers wanting to place text ads on Kamat.com.  The following is a discussion of our technology and some wisdom on implementing your own "Bottom of the Page™"

"More Like This" Technology

MLT (More-Like-This) features are not so easy to implement if they are conceived as afterthought to creation of content. In our content management system (CMS), we use keywords to associate and group related content and pictures. But there is much more to MLT than simple keyword based associations.

We started Kamat eXtra as a project to develop associative technology and tools that will suggest products and links based not on human intelligence, but based in acquired heuristics. But soon we realized that the commercial interests would collide with the academic interests of this effort, and decided to rank a sponsor higher than the computed value of the suggested link.

Some of the parameters to we considered were:

• Aliases -- The software must learn Ganapati and Vinayaka are same.
• Page Rank™ing -- the more the page is linked, it is more relevant, the more a page or product is referenced, it is more relevant
• Physical proximity  -- this is a very important parameter, building on human intelligence. We can safely say all the files in a folder (or products on one shelf at a store) are related to each other in some way.

Text Advertisements on Kamat.com
 (a.k.a. Bottom of the Page Links)

The links at the bottom of most pages on Kamat.com are gathered from three sources:

• Vendor APIs: Just before publishing a story or a picture, our software queries vendor's catalogs to see if there are any products that might be of interest to the reader. Currently we query Amazon.com through web-services.

• Relevant Links: Google's AdWords/AdSense technology makes it possible to insert textual advertisements that are relevant to the contents of the page.

• Sponsored links: Some of the advertisers have specified specific pages to run their campaign

Benefits of Our Implementation

Like everything else on Kamat's Potpourri, the links and contents are statically rendered. This makes the website faster by an order of magnitude because there are no run-time rules to interpret or include files. The advertisers prefer this type of technology because the search engines do not count links placed from ad. servers, but count the links placed by a local server.

See Also:

• The Amateur Webmaster
• Advertise on Kamat's Potpourri -- Information for advertisers on how to advertise on Kamat's Potpourri website. Includes details on "Bottom-of-the-page" text messages.

 

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