Data services provider Factual is announcing a new API this morning for developers: Monetize. It becomes the sixth API in the Factual data family.
With “Monetize,” Factual has aggregated deal feeds (i.e., Groupon, LivingSocial, Yelp, Signpost, GrubHub and others) and “geo-indexed” them to places. The businesses listed in the deals have precise locations and so does the user. So these deals can be “hyper-localized.”
Here’s how Factual’s Bill Michels describes the new API:
Developers can integrate these offers into their apps and earn money based on the conversions they are driving — this API actually pays you. Factual will cut you checks when your users buy offers: show them a great sushi deal that’s nearby, and if they buy it, you earn bucks. With this service, you no longer need to integrate with multiple offer APIs or affiliate programs, or implement multiple tracking tools. We even autogenerate 320×50 images for each offer so you can integrate it as a regular mobile ad unit.
As an interesting side note, Factual is generating dynamic display ad creative to go with the offers. There’s also a developer preview tool that shows the offer feeds and associated data.
I spoke at some length to Bill Michels and Tyler Bell of Factual yesterday. One of the very interesting things the company offers is its Geopulse API, which allows mobile publishers or developers to grab a bunch of data about places. This enables better ad/audience targeting among other things.
This product is similar to ones from Skyhook Wireless, PlaceIQ and Placed.com (which I have yet to write about). In part what these tools and services do is uncover “who’s there.” They make location a proxy for audience to varying degrees.
Very interesting stuff that I’ll be exploring more.
August 15th, 2012 at 3:59 pm
[...] brands and sophisticated marketers. I’ve already written about PlaceIQ, Skyhook, Placed and Factual. All of them to varying degrees are creating audience and location profiles to enable markerters to [...]