Domain (country) realted banners in PHP based system

Question

I have an PHP based Youtube clone system installed on our server.

The same system is used in couple of countries. Let's say that I have 3 domains that all point to the same system:
www.site.hr
www.site.ba
www.site.rs

They all redirect to some site named www.site.tv

These 3 countries have very similar languages so it makes sense to have the same system for every country, but inside the system it would be great to display banners related to that particular country.

What is the best way to do that, and is it even possible? My ideas were:
1) to lookup every visitors IP and check from which country is it or
2) to create 3 subdomains hr.site.tv, ba.site.tv and rs.site.tv, which are all
separate systems but share the same database...

I know that first idea is flawed, and second one is plausible. Do you have any better idea?

Answer 1

IP address lookup and GeoIP are not reliable. Sniffing $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] won't be of much help because they may return the same languages, or not at all if user prefers English, for example.

Using subdomains, or different URL paths within the same domain, is recommended if these are your in-house banners. Third-party ad providers may have their own market-targeting algorithms.

Answer 2

If you don't need a robust system but only add the possibility to set the banners for some (most) users, you might use that simple solution :

www.site.hr redirects to www.site.tv?lang=hr
www.site.ba redirects to www.site.tv?lang=ba
www.site.rs redirects to www.site.tv?lang=rs

then store the lang parameter in $_SESSION and use it to display the related banners as people keep visiting internal pages.

you'd need to have a default behaviour for the case when that parameter doesn't exist in session (for robots for instance).

you'll have the benefits of very little duplicate content and little change to the existing code (i suppose).