I signed up for this service from Voxant. You can go in, search through news stories by subject, choose a story and they give you code to embed the story in your site. The code creates a story box and has a related banner ad. The source of the story gets 40%, they get 40% and we get 20% of ad revenue, not a great deal but hey, I’m playing around here!
They don’t care about how much traffic you have which differentiates them from the other big ad servers. Their theory (which the domain world should love) is that while the big sites comprise 50% of overall web traffic, the little guys make up all the rest and, as such, represent untapped potential for advertisers.
I tried embedding one on Burner Trouble, my climate blog. Unfortunately they’ve made a critical error in the size of the units- their smallest width of story plus ad is over 600 pixels wide which means it won’t fit in the default text area for many blog templates. I wrote them a note about it.
I like the idea of grabbing free licensed content if they (or we) can fix this…
Here’s another issue. The story was about water shortages but the ad was for Cadillacs! These two do not go together!