Nestoria UK Blog

Nestoria fans,

as you know we keep an eagle eyed watch on the interweb for new trends in map based services and how they might be applied to the property search space. Today we talk with Nick Black, long time force in the UK geo enthusiast scene, and now co-founder of new map based advertising start up Mappam.

Nick, thanks for talking with us.

1. Explain a bit the concept behind Mappam. Why is it a useful solution for advertisers and for webmasters?

Mappam is about putting your adverts on the map. There are loads of map-mashup sites out there, ranging from high traffic commercial sites like Plazes or Nestoria that use Google Maps as a base map, or community sites like OpenStreetMap, to the hundreds of new map-mashups that appear every week. Mappam gives the people who run these sites a chance to earn some money and gives advertisers a chance to reach a massive audience.

As an advertiser, you can visit mappam.com and place an advert, choosing the exact location where you want the ad to appear, and uploading a small icon to represent your ad. The icon you upload will appear on all of our host’s sites. When someone clicks on it, a bubble will pop up, showing your advert. You only pay when someone clicks on the info bubble and is redirected to your site, and you get to choose how much you pay.

As a host, you can add one line of Javascript to your existing Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Multimap or OpenStreetMap/OpenLayers map and Mappam ads will appear. When one of your visitors clicks, you earn money.

2. Are you seeing more and more ‘mash-ups’ trying to make the leap from side hobby project to actually becoming a viable business? Why should they choose Mappam versus something like AdSense.

The map-site business model is unproven, to say the least. A major problem with using traditional banner advertising on a map-site is the lack of context – the advertising provider will usually key-word search your site, so a site like OpenStreetMap has adverts for companies selling geo-data, but nothing that is related the geographic context of the site. If map-mashup sites can display adverts on their maps, they will be presenting their users with information that is relevant to them. The users will be happier with their experience, they will be more likely to click on the ad and the site will earn more money (as well as have happier users).

3. What are your thoughts on balancing the need for monetisation with user experience?

User experience is important, but providing the most relevant information is the most important thing. With Mappam, people can monetise their sites and provide relevant information to their visitors at the same time. Banner ads are bad for maps for two reasons: they don’t provide relevant information and they take up loads of space. No-one wants a map-site with half the screen taken up with adverts. Mappam ads are small icons that take up just a tiny amount of screen space – making for a much better user experience.

4. What possibilities do you see for map based advertising specifically in the property sector?

There a load of opportunities for map advertising within the property sector and we’re really happy to have Nestoria onboard as Mappam launch partners. For those with property to sell, Mappam provides a great platform for getting the message across. There’s also a lot of opportunity for providing relevant information to prospective house buyers – I bet Ikea would love to be able to reach everyone who’s going to buy a flat in Putney. If they combined the Mappam API with Nestoria’s API, they would know the size of house you were looking at and could advertise your perfect kitchen. Imagine that!

Thanks Nick. Great to see that the tidal wave of technical innovation in online cartography over the last 18 months is now starting to be matched by business innovation as well. We’ll obviously be watching Mappam closely.

past Nestoria interviews: Fleming Madsen, Mike Price, Prashant Agarwal.