It begins: BotRevenue.com to serve ads in bots

We’ve just noticed the appearance of a site called BotRevenue.com, which is setting itself up as a platform that allows chatbot owners to promote other bots and get traffic back.

The service hasn’t launched yet. When we applied for access, we got a message saying it wasn’t live yet, but that we’d be contacted when it is.

So we’re left with the basic info the site provides: BotRevenue says it will take a 25 percent commission and that for every 1000 clicks you send to another bot, you will receive 750 clicks back. It specifies that ad messages will be limited to promo text of up to 140 characters and will link to the advertised product.

Here’s what the ad would look like:

Beautiful, huh?

BotRevenue is apparently owned by the same company that runs BotFamily, a catalog of the best chatbots offered by messaging services like Telegram, Facebook, Slack, and Kik.

The site says that after you get accepted for the service, it will offer you available bots for ad exchange. You can then start a campaign, and it will send users back to you. It adds that a personal analytics dashboard, advanced targeting, and an SDK for developers are all coming.

So there you have it. Last week, we ran a column about how the chatbot gold rush is officially here, now that Facebook, Telegram, Kik, Microsoft and others have all announced platforms that allow businesses to connect with users via chat.

One thing to note is that some of the chat platforms, including Facebook’s giant Messenger chat service, have made it clear that they intend to exert strong control over what is allowed. Facebook said its chatbot platform is still in beta and that it’s not intended for advertising just yet. But these sorts of ads from BotRevenue are unlikely to be accepted.

We’ve pinged the company to find out more information and will report back when we do.