Recently, I’ve been hearing lots of hype about the pepperjam advertising system.

It sound similar to Google Adsense, in that you can place contextual ads on your website.

So I thought: hey, I’ll give it a go.

After signing up (and being accepted), I manually selected who will be able to advertise on my website.

Now this can be both good and bad.

Bad in that either: I might have a limited number advertisers to choose from, or I might have too many (and need to spend a long time vetting them all).

Good in that I can have complete control what appears on my site.

So I selected about 12 relevant advertisers.

Some will automatically allow me to show their ad on my website, while others wanted to check me out first (I presume they check my website, to make sure it isn’t something like a porn website masquerading as a craft website).

I’ve had 2 advertisers reject me (I suspect it might be because they only want US websites, and mine is Australian).

There also seems to be 2 ways I can advertise

• place the adverts manually on my site (each advertiser will give you the code for the type of AD you want to display ie: anything from a simple text link, up to large animated graphic adverts).
• Use the pepperjamADS function

Now, pepperjamADS is similar to google adsense, except you select a range of ads (from the advertisers that are on your “partners” list), select the format of the banner (eg 728X90 leaderboard, 250X250 square, etc)

Once you place the code for pepperjamADS on your website, partner adverts are displayed as 1 or more text links (similar to google).

Since I only have 9 partners in my partner list, then I suspect the ads placed in the banner will be more of a random selection, than a contextual list.

So far, its all interesting, and shows a lot of promise.

But I have had one slight problem:

I tried the pepperjamADS vertical skyscraper/banner, and found that the wording seemed to get truncated (or the space allocated for the adverts wasn’t large enough… I’m not sure which).

The upshot is that many ads will end something like: “… for the best service and”

I figure: Its a new service, its bound to have some teething problems… I’m not concerned.

I’ll just send them a bug report, and see what happens.

I sent the report on Saturday, and by Wednesday night, I didn’t get any feedback.

Now, a small bug doesn’t worry me much, but not getting so much as a short email to say “we are looking into it” is a bit more worrying.

When a company doesn’t provide some feedback, then I start to question the quality of customer service.

At this stage I’ve removed all my pepperjamADS vertical adverts, and I’m going to wait and see what happens.

Hopefully, its just a minor hiccup.