Sounds great! Congrats on the new project. I look forward to the day I have enough traffic to actually be able to genrate income from my site *chuckle*.
Realized that I forgot to answer some questions...
@Jeffry: Payments are currently done manually since each ad needs to be reviewed before it can go live. However, I may improve this process by building it into the admin flow.
@Thomas: Yes, I've already been seeing a trend of boutique networks and plenty of networks targeting the blogger crowd. The ad industry as a whole is quite large and I think there's still plenty of room. I suppose the biggest problem is getting the word out. As a publisher, we have to actively present SidebarAds as an option to companies we know, especially ones we know who advertise. That and referrals will likely be the ways we grow the business.
Congratulations, I think the idea of this project is great! SidebarAds look really cool, I'm sure they will be very useful!
I think this brilliant idea of making a micro-network ads, it seems that this model works quite well in specialized content sites.
I personally do not like me adsense sites for web development, although I have in my lab.