A week or so ago, I meet up with Eugene from Intruders.tv, to answer a few questions about Mappam. You can see the interview here.

Over the last couple of days Google have rolled out ads on Maps:

If you search for ‘hotels in fulham’, you get sponsored links of Hotels - in Fulham. We’ve known that this was going to happen since day one - those pretty maps don’t come for free.

So what does this entry into the map location advertising market mean for services like Mappam.com? Before Mappam was even a twinkle in the milk-man’s eye, we knew that other providers were going to advertise on their maps at some point. Now that they have begun to role out location ads, there’s a few things to look at.

Firstly, Google’s move into location advertising is a great validation for the model - they believe that map based advertising will work - that advertisers will want to advertise and that users will benefit from the information that ads on maps deliver.

There are a few differences between Google’s implementation and ours though. Mappam let our users upload a custom icon to represent the advert they are placing, which the user can place at any location on the map. In the next release of Mappam (coming in the next week or so) advertisers will be able to place adverts within an area, rather than a precise point - so if you want to advertise a chain of coffee shops in a particular town, or promote an event like a carnival, which doesn’t strictly have one location, Mappam will place an ad when the user looks in the relevant area.

Mappam was designed to allow people who host maps on their own sites to make money. If you host Mappam ads you earn money every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your site. At the moment, Google are only showing adverts on their main site - not on any of the hundreds of thousands of sites that are built around Google Maps. At this stage, no-one knows if Google will allow sites that use their maps to make money from hosting their adverts. Mappam will do - we’re doing so right now.

From the perspective of an advertiser, advertising with Mappam means you are avoiding lock-in. If your company are an information provider, given that Google’s mission is to organise the worlds information, will they be happy advertising about the services of their competitors. More importantly, will their shareholders?

What if Google change their Terms and Conditions and stop your service? Mappam ads could still be shown on top of Yahoo, Microsoft, Multimap or OpenStreetMap/OpenLayers maps.

What if Google don’t have great imagery or mapps for your area? Take a look at this map from Multimap - the biggest provider of online Mapping in the UK:

Multimap have a far richer data-set than Google for the UK - something that really shows up in central London. Advertising with Mappam.com gives you the choice.

We’re pleased to announce that Parkatmyhouse.com are now hosting Mappam ads on their site.

Parkatmyhouse matches people without parking spaces to people with parking spaces - simple and effective. Its great to see principles of crowd sourcing being applied to new areas - especially they are dominated by large, stagnant companies. So if you have a parking space sitting empty, or you don’t want to pay $$$ to park in a car park (or even more to park at a meter), head over to Parkatmyhouse.com.

We’re super pleased to say tagzania has become a partner. Browse and build your own maps over at tagzania.com

Map based advertising is here. Mappam makes it easy to put your ads on the map. If you have a website with a map on, you could be earning money from Mappam. Sound good?

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. With Mappam, people can monetise their sites and provide relevant information to their visitors at the same time. Mappam helps you to get rid of banner ads that take up valuable screen space and provide information that is largely unrelated to the geographic context of the map on your site.

We are pleased to be launching with several partners, including UK-based property search engine, Nestoria, social mapping site Plazes, web-tourism site Google Site-seeing and the community mapping site, Mappam and get started right away.

For business or press enquiries, email Mappam.

Many thanks to Tom, Tom, John and Matt for all their help and support.