Text Ads

Yesterday, I was digging through MSN 7.5's strings, and I found an XPath for what looked like text ads. Soon enough, after plopping the node names into Google, I found some example code of the supposed text ad configuration. When I added the necessary text ad configuration to get MSN to load the XML from my local server, I had my hypothesis proven.

Here's the XML used for text ads:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<TEXTAD>
<adtext>Display Text</adtext> <!-- Display text for the text ad -->
<hiturl>https://www.example.com</hiturl> <!-- Target link -->
<tab /> <!-- Don't know the use for this, but probably nothing to do with MSN tabs -->
<ct /> <!-- Anything to do with `ct` from the TWN challenge? -->
<flag>0</flag> <!-- Flags. Not sure what kind though -->
</TEXTAD>

And here's the config used in MsgrConfig to load the ads:

<LocalizedConfig Market="en-US">
  ...
  <AdMainConfig>
    ...
    <TextAdRefresh>1</TextAdRefresh>
    <TextAdServer>http://rad.msn.com/ADSAdClient31.dll?GetAd?PG=IMUSX1?LANG=EN?ID=$PUID$</TextAdServer>
    ...
  </AdMainConfig>
  ...
</LocalizedConfig>

I'm hoping this can be used to advertise any Escargot features/services and related projects, especially since they'd be easier to implement than graphical ads, which require knowledge in... graphic design. And most people aware of Escargot have very little to no experience in that (there's @TReKiE , but who knows if he'd be up for making every possible graphical ad sporadically). :p

If anyone's up for suggestions, then feel free to drop them below.