Well it has finally happened–Auctionads has told us something about their faltering ad product. The big news here is that Auctionads.com is now to be known as ShoppingAds which I am guessing has to do with AuctionAds–oops…I mean ShoppingAds (that’s going to take some getting used to) not wanting to be caught in such a small box (Auctions). I think they want to be known as a more general ad service catering to auctions and other forms of consumerism on the web.

The Low Down…

The reincarnated service will now be serving CPA ads for eBay and CPC ads for other shopping engines and their partner sites. According to an email I received, there will be no huge change to AuctionAds users (except for the branding and the trend I speak about below).

Following the Trend

As part of this deal AuctionAds.com (now known as shoppingads.com) is once again following a trend that i’ve seen on a lot of other ad services–Discriminating, I mean differentiating, on the basis of publisher ‘quality’ by adding a premium status which–surprise, surprise discriminates based on your traffic’s location.

Here’s how that differentiation will work:

The premium service allows for CPC conversions for traffic from the U.S. and Canada–All other traffic will be stuck in Cost Per Action (CPA) Land. All of this while standard publishers are to be perpetually stuck in CPA land regardless of where their traffic originates from.

This is all find and good but I’m left to wonder one thing–How is shoppingads.com going to decide who is premium-worthy and who isn’t? I haven’t seen any indication of a standard criteria to be met or exceeded by publishers for premium status. Just so you know the company will begin to notify those selected as premium publishers in the coming days–so stay tuned.