I love these new feature announcements.

Due to popular demand, in addition to PayPal, you can now receive payments directly from advertisers if you have an Authorize.Net or USAePay account.

This is a great new feature that demonstrates our commitment to making it easier for you to receive payments directly without paying commissions to advertising middle men, and only dealing with the payment processor of your choice.

You can learn more about Authorize.Net here and about USAepay here.

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This feature has been on our todo list for over 4 months, and was constantly postponed and postponed again until we finally got our act together and implemented it.

It is ridiculously simple to use. For example if an advertiser has a Facebook account, they just need to click on the Facebook logo and they’ll be redirected to Facebook to login and connect their account to your ad platform. No passwords, no forms. That’s all it is. They are logged in - as simple as A-B-C.

It makes it easy for advertisers to get started so you won’t lose any potential advertiser because of the pain of filling yet another sign up form.

Go on, try it out in the demo. Kudos to RPX for helping us make it possible.

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We’ve been asked frequently to provide a free version of the platform and we are happy to say it is finally here.  The Free package is designed for those of you who prefer extending the trial further than 7 days.

As many can testify, having your own customized ad managing platform allows you to

• keep 100% of your ad sales,
• develop a closer and trusting relationship with your advertisers.

It is a win-win game. You get to keep 100% of your ad revenue and provide your advertisers will with an easy-to-use branded ad manager. You’ll build a strong relationship with them which encourage them to continue buying advertising from you.

So what are you waiting for? Try the free package today and let us know what you think.

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Chris Petersen has a successful blog. He generates millions of page views monthly, which he currently monetizes with Google AdSense and a couple of other ad networks.

He also gets about 10 - 20 emails from advertisers every day. Requests range from “Send me your price list (or rate card in advertising lingo)” to “Can we get a 40% discount if we commit to advertising for 6 months”.

Poor (and I use that term lightly) Chris just wants to write content so he does a quick search on Google, and discovers a little tool called Trafficspaces. Great. Now, advertisers can just book their ads online and get their discounts automatically. Problem solved. Err, no.

It turns out that Chris doesn’t really know what price to sell his ad spaces - $10CPM for the home page leaderboard?, $0.10 per click for the text ads near the footer? To compound the problem, it turns out that his advertisers all have different opinions on what the “right price” is.

Solution - use an auction. Duh! Google does it, Facebook does it. Of course, it makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that before.

This story is pretty common, so we’ve added auction-based pricing to Trafficspaces.

Here is how it works:

1. You set up your minimum price, and the incremental amounts that advertisers are allowed to bid.

2. At checkout, the advertiser specifies their budget and their max bid price

3. For every impression that is served, the ad server runs an auction and the ad with the best bid and performance wins. Simple.

Now you have the elegance of Facebook and Google Auctions for a fraction of its price.

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1. Increased Control/Transparency - With Federated Media or any ad network, there is a Chinese wall that shields Techcrunch from its advertisers.
   
   This may not look like a big deal when you are a small blog but as a growing business, it is important to understand your customers and build a relationship with them. Systems like Trafficspaces allow you to do just that. Our API even allows you to get a data feed of all registered users and integrate it with your own system.
2. Increased Profit - This one is quite obvious. Get your own self-serve system and keep 100% of your ad sales revenue. It makes economic sense especially during these uncertain times.

In summary, there is a clear trend toward systems like Trafficspaces. We see it in the quality and quantity of enquires that come in every day. We welcome it and are prepared to satisfy the demand.

With the help of our existing users, we’ve launched a simpler ad campaign workflow, flexible pricing, discounts, coupons, branded storefronts, direct payments into your account and lots more.

Thanks everyone and keep the feedback coming.

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