Internet Advertising

Technorati Media, The Advertising Network from Technorati

2008-06-25T08:59:56Z

Technorati have recently joined the blogging advertising network business by launching their Blog Ad Network Technorati Media. The new service will compete with ad networks such Federated Media and Glam, and will provide advertising on CPM basis with negotiable rates. Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy, according to TechCrunch. This have been after that Technorati raised $7.5 million of financing according to a regulatory filing.

Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content. Technorati Media extends our service and value by matching bloggers and social media creators with marketers who want to join the conversation.

Microsoft AdCenter API with PHP

2008-04-19T09:21:00Z

Walter Poupore, Lead Programming Writer Microsoft adCenter API, have written a series of articles over the official Microsoft AdCenter API blog about using the AdCenter API from PHP. According to his blog posts, PHP samples in V5 will be released later by May 2008. Until that day, you can find some samples over the API Blog. Current samples include :

AdSense, Change your ads without changing ad code

2007-11-07T06:59:00Z

Google AdSense is rolling out a new feature allowing publishers to make ad changes without changing the ad code. AdSense is now offering hosted version of its ads which will help publishers to change their banners easily and make better experiments. I was lukcy to have this new feature already rolled out, and the difference that currently after choosing ad style, colors and channels, your ad will be saved and gived a specified slot.

The JavaScript now include only the client ID, slot number, width and height. The new google_ad_slot is a unique slot linked to your banner, so you can make any changes you want without changing the banner code. According to AdSense, changes may not appear for up to 10 minutes, so be patient after editing to see your changes running for all users. Pretty interesting feature that will certainly help to make more experiments with AdSense on your website.

Source Inside AdSense

Adwords Campaign Optimizer Tool Launched

2007-07-31T19:38:43Z

A new AdWords ad performance tool is available today called "Campaign Optimizer". The tools aims to provide personalized campaign ideas in just minutes, to get better performance and increase your advertising return. some of the ideas that Campaign Optimizer might propose to help improve your campaign's performance:

Change daily budget. Budget adjustments can affect your ad visibility and bring you more traffic.
Add new keywords. Campaign Optimizer proposes targeted keywords that relate to your landing page.
Change keyword matching options. The right matching option can help you reach customers more effectively.
Adjust keyword maximum cost-per-click bid. Your maximum CPC bid (in addition to your ad quality) affects your ad position.
Change ad text. Your ad text affects your click-through rate.

Via Inside AdWords

MediaWhiz Acquired AuctionAds

2007-07-31T08:21:26Z

I thought that AuctionAds was launched by the same guys of TLA, which owned by MediaWhiz, until last saturday's announcement over TLA. According to their blog post "MediaWhiz started off as a minority share holder in AuctionAds", when the project seems to be successful they acquired the whole company. Congratulation for AuctionAds who made of eBay Auctions a successful advertising product that collected 20,000 publishers in just four months and received eBay Star developer award for 2007.

New Admob My Landing Pages

2007-07-18T07:07:45Z

AdMob just launched a new landing pages tool for advertisers which will help creating mobile web pages for their ads. An amazing new tool very easy to use with drag and drop and you can see a live preview of your web page directly from the tool. The pages created will be hosted on AdMob servers and you can submit your page by SMS to preview it on your mobile device.

I had a phone interview with Omar Hamoui, founder and CEO of Admob, last Friday and this is one of Admob's commitments that they are currently keeping the focus on, in addition to optimizations of their mobile network. Speed could be very well noticed over the statistics which have been recently improved with a new AJAX-based interface and flash graphics. Today even if you don't have a mobile site, you can create a campaign and generate traffic to your product. I think it's a very promising move.

AdSense Referrals 2.0 Launched

2007-06-29T13:48:20Z

Today AdSense Referrals goes public after about four months of testing. The new version will be rolled out progressively to all publishers in referrals-supported languages. Best feature in the new referrals version that it provide more than Google products, and include products from thousands of AdWords advertisers so you can have a better choice of what could better fit with your blog or website. From AdSense Blog :

Expanded product inventory: While many of you have had success referring one of our Google products, some of you weren't able to find a product that fit the context of your site. Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites.
Category and keyword targeting: With thousands of products available, it can be difficult to decide which ads will perform best on your site. That's why we give you the option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site. Whether you want ads for a specific category, advertiser, or product, referrals 2.0 will give you the control to decide.
Ad unit optimization: It can be tricky picking the best ads for your site, so we've included ad unit optimization for referrals. When you create a new referral ad unit, simply select the Pick best performing ads option. We'll then compare your selected ads to other relevant ads, and serve the ads we expect to perform best on your site.
Better targeting for pages with multiple themes: With standard contextual targeting, ads may not match up directly with the text around them if there are a number of themes on the page. With referrals, you can select unique “keywords” for each ad unit to narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting means higher earnings for your site.
Greater compensation for high-quality traffic: Since referrals are paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, your traffic matters. If the traffic you send to advertisers is more likely to turn into a completed sale or lead, you will earn more with referrals.
Add your seal of approval: Unlike AdSense for content ads, our program policies allow you to make specific references to referral ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.

AdSense With Rounded Corners

2007-06-26T21:24:06Z

A new experiment just goes public for AdSense to use Rounded corners instead of the classic squared corners. The new feature provides two flavors of rounded corners: slightly rounded and Very rounded. Of course if you don't opt for anyone the squared will be displayed by default. What I find interesting is that usually borders are annoying to make ads stick with content and generate very low CTR, now it's interesting to experiment the new ads especially with the rounded Google logo which fit very well with the new design.

AdSense goes web 2.0 with the new look, and it's the first contextual advertising program which started providing such new look for its ads. I think blogs concerned are mainly those with very web 2.0 designs and which usually don't generate much clicks. I have opted for very rounded corner just to test it, and thing that I didn't like is especially the text which is very close at the corner with very rounded corners, probably it's more interesting to experiment slightly rounded corners instead of the very rounded ones.

OpenAds Raises $5 million

2007-06-14T12:46:51Z

Three open source projects phpAdsNew, phpPgAds and Max Media Manager have joined forces to create a single and global solution that is called OpenAds. The solution which is very well known for the PHP Community and the advertising business, have been used widely even by very well known advertising companies such FMpub. The investment have been raised by Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, and a number of incredible angel investors - to help Openads realise its vision: to become the platform that all websites use to make money online.

According to OpenAds Blog, the money will help releasing new versions of the software fast. A good news for an open source PHP project which is moving a step forward to confirm its position as best "ad server". Currently 3 different version of OpenAds is available for download, but this going to be merged very soon. Also I wanted to mention that OpenAds is hiring, if you are around central London you might check this. Below the press release :

Openads, the developer of a free, open source adserver designed for and used by publishers worldwide, secured a $5 million Series A financing led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The London-based company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team.

AOL Acquired Mobile Advertising Company Third Screen Media

2007-05-15T20:53:48Z

Today AOL announced the acquisition of Third Screen Media, Mobile Advertising company, for an undisclosed price to expand Advertising.com's mobile services for both advertisers and publishers. According to the press release the US mobile advertising market is expected to grow from $421 million in 2006 to $4.7 billion by 2011, while globally the market is expected to increase to $11.3 billion by the same year, according to eMarketer. I don't know the potential of AOL in mobile content, because if Advertising.com will focus mainly on publisher's content AOL won't profit much from the deal. Below the press release :

DULLES, VA - May 15, 2007 - AOL announced today that it has acquired Third Screen Media, the leading mobile advertising network and mobile ad-serving and management platform provider. Third Screen Media will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of AOL's Advertising.com division.

"AOL is one of only four at-scale advertising businesses on the Internet, and the acquisition of Third Screen Media gives us a very strong position in the fast-growing mobile space," said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO of AOL. "It also lets us offer advertisers a more complete set of solutions, from display advertising to search and now a superior set of mobile solutions."

New ReviewMe Advertisers MarketPlace, A PayPerPost Killer

2007-05-02T12:04:41Z

ReviewMe just launched a brand new Marketplace, a new PayPerPost Killer new feature which will allow advertisers to create Campaigns of review offers for bloggers. On the other side bloggers will be able to choose from the Review Clearinghouse one or more reviews according to the category choosen for their blogs. The new Marketplace will give more control to the advertiser while still giving the blogger 100% control over what review offers they accept.

Advertisers get to set up the information they would like reviewed, the number of reviews they would like to receive and how much they would like to spend per review. The minimum review price is $10. Advertisers now have the flexibility of purchasing reviews off top blogs individually or creating campaigns for many relevant bloggers to blog about!

Bloggers are able to grab the feed to be notified automatically of new reviews available in the marketplace matching their categories. This feature will be certainly very interesting for new bloggers who are not getting enough paid reviews on their blogs. From ReviewMe I have found some reviews range from $6 to $12 which is not bad for a paid post, but too low compared to some blogger's price.

Yahoo! To Buy Right Media For $680 Million

2007-04-30T08:30:45Z

The Web Advertising Market is hot these days with the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google for $3.1 billion, Yahoo today announced the acquisition of Right Media, the company behind the innovative advertising network RMX, for $680 million in equal parts of stock and cash reported the New York Times. Yahoo, which bought a 20 percent stake in Right Media last October, will become owner of Right Media after buying the remaining interest in the company.

"The acquisition, to us, is a key step toward executing our long-term vision to build the leading advertising and publisher ecosystem both on and off the Yahoo network," Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive, said in an interview. The deal is to be announced today and is expected to close in three months.

Yahoo wich run already YPN for US publishers only in beta, will be more able to sell and broker ads for more publishers in a market monopolized by Google AdSense according to the latest Google financial results. Yahoo was using RMX for the last year over their websites and had become more comfortable with its capabilities. I'm very excited because I joined RMX only two weeks ago and will start to implement their solution very soon over our network.

StumbleUpon to be Acquired by eBay

2007-04-18T22:03:05Z

TechCrunch just reported that StumbleUpon just signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired for a price ranged between $40 and $45 million. We have posted last month about StumbleUpon and how it will hit the advertising market, but seeing eBay in the acquisition is a bit surprising and wondering how they will manage this new acquisition for the profit of their business.

According to ComScore StumbleUpon generated 6 million U.S. page views in March, doubling from the prior month and increasing daily with more than 2 million users and 4+ million sites stumbled daily. Is it that profitable to acquire such potential of traffic rather than spending such amounts on advertising ? We'll learn certainly more when the deal is close and eBay will reveal how they will stumbleupon this acquisition. Notice that StumbleUpon has raised close to $1.5 million in seed financing since its launch.

Google Acquired Doubleclick For $3.1 Billion

2007-04-14T06:34:50Z

The news if official now, Google announced the acquisition of Doubleclick for $3.1 billion in cash !! Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management explained over the Google blog :

This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users. Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in turn, provide a better experience for our users.

This is going to be a great opportunity for both advertisers, publishers and agencies to profit from Google technology in internet advertising. Google hosted a webcast and conference call to discuss the acquisition, you can find the live audio webcast of the conference call here.

Yahoo! Join the Mobile Advertising Market

2007-04-09T22:46:15Z

Yahoo! have launched their Mobile advertising network, a new competitor to Admob and Google (who currently testing silently mobile advertising). We have already mentioned in a previous post of what Yahoo! is capable on mobile market, and it's clear that they are the first big publisher in this new network. The service is already accepting new publishers, but it looks that Yahoo! is more interested to attract big publishers with more than one Million page view per month for launching, but the news is that the registration page mention not only advertising on mobile web page, but also on client applications (eg. Mobile Games), SMS and other, and they are already talking about video advertising on mobile. That's Quick !