Today I came across a unique type of advertisements that publishers can place on their blog or web site. emptyspaceads is system that bridges advertisers and publishers by way of ads that appear when a visitor moves his mouse over the empty space of your web site. Presently the only participating network in their system is Shopping Ads.

When you add a web site at emptyspaceads, you need to decide the percentage of time the Network and Personal ads are shown. A good value is 50%-50%.

Two types of ads can be placed:

1. Network Ads: Presently the only participating network in their system is Shopping Ads. You will have to sign up at Shopping Ads (formerly known as AuctionAds), if you don’t have an account there already. Then paste the code into emptyspaceads.
2. Personal (In-Site) Ads: Text and Image ads can be placed. These can link to any URL of your choice. When creating a personal ad, you have the option of letting emptyspaceads determine the empty space on your site (where the ads will be displayed) or you can specify the ad region (ads will be displayed only when the visitor’s mouse is in the region). This ad region is specified by adding a CSS class to the HTML element.

The Overview tab gives a summary of the number of impressions, ad displays, mouse overs, clicks, and CTR.

You might be wondering what’s in it for emptyspaceads in all this. They get a pie (50% to be exact) of the Network ads that are displayed on your site.

Finally inorder for the emptyspaceads to appear on every page of your site, you need to place the generated code just before the closing body tag in your site’s footer.

Conclusion: emptyspaceads is a new type of player in the online advertising field and since it isn’t over-used (yet), it holds a tremendous potential especially for site owners who run a products/reviews related sites/blogs. It could be improved by adding Personal ads in the form of widgets (HTML and RSS, for example). One usage, then, could be for a blog owner to specify the simplepied RSS feed (just the title linked to the post generated via SimplePie) of his blog in a Personal ad widget showing all the items when a visitor mouses over the empty space. Thus it becomes a fast and unobtrusive way of navigating the blog.