Montreal Tech Watch

Carl Charest just wrote to me that Branchez-vous is launching today BV!Max, an ad serving program for bloggers, webmasters, and web publishers in Québec. Unlike the previous initiative by Transcontinental Media, which chose an elite group of 20 A-List business bloggers, BV!Max can be used by any website, although there are a few conditions: you have to have more than 1000 unique visitors per month, and your content must be geared mainly for french-speaking Québecers.

Webmasters can list up to 3 websites, and choose a relevant category. After verification, they can then show ads on their website. Payments are then sent monthly by checks, like Google’s Adsense, with a minimum of 25$. Also, there is no contract, so you can bail out anytime.

This is a serious offer by Branchez-vous, web publishers can then focus on what they do best, i.e. making content, and let the BV!Max sales team take care of finding relevant announcers. BV!Max will then supply highly targeted ads, based upon the category chosen, making it a win-win for everybody.

However, I would have liked them to show the rates for the ads. It’s not clear if the $25 is associated to the 1000 unique visitors, so I have no idea on how much revenues a website can get from this program. It may be because each category/announcer has its own rates. Also, my concern is that many read blogs nowdays through RSS feeds, but BV!Max solution is just an HTML solution.

Still, I find the program interesting and innovative, I like the fact that it’s open to anybody, and that local content producers can now rely on relevant ads instead of random ads from Adsense.