• Meet with members of the U.S. Congress and their staffs to tell the story of your small business
• Take deep dives into tactics and strategies necessary to grow your business in today’s digital environment
• Network with small publishers from across the country, sharing tips and best practices
• Be guests of honor at a special networking reception and dinner at the Google offices in Washington, D.C.

More information plus photos and highlights from last year’s Fly-In can be found here. Or click here to watch a short video from last year’s event.

There is no charge to attend but you must pay for your own travel and lodging. The IAB has secured a special, sponsored nightly rate of $150 at the Washington Marriott.

This is a great opportunity to network, learn, and advocate for your small business. If you would like to be part of this special event, visit www.iab.net/flyin to register and book your hotel. Or if you want more information, please reach out to Chris Glushko, Director of Marketing, IAB, at chris@iab.net or 212-380-4722.

We hope to see some of you there!

About FindTheBest

FindTheBest is an objective, data-driven comparison engine that helps users find and compare their options so that they can make the most informed decisions.  FindTheBest, which is organized into 9 broad categories, covers hundreds of comparisons from smartphones and investment advisors to colleges and dog breeds—it has been described as an online Consumer Reports for all the big decisions in life. Each comparison is made up of anywhere from dozens to thousands of detailed listings and paired with smart filters, to help users narrow down and compare their options based on the factors important to them.

Drive Traffic, Monetize Site with FindTheBest’s Widgets

FindTheBest’s newly launched customizable widgets (and WordPress plugin for WP bloggers) are easy to embed into blogs and other sites, and help drive web traffic, increase page views, extend the time users are engaged on a publisher site and also help users monetize their site. Many of FindTheBest’s product widgets include “Buy Now” buttons that allow publishers to easily monetize their site at no cost to them.

Getting Started With FindTheBest’s Widgets

FindTheBest’s widgets are free to download and simple to install. To get started, register on FindTheBest and then visit FindTheBest’s Widgets and WordPress plugin page to install and find out how to customize and embed widgets into your site.

Single-listing widget

Multiple-listing widget

There are five main DailyBuzz media properties, including DailyBuzz Healthy Living, DailyBuzz Luxe, DailyBuzz Moms, DailyBuzz Style and DailyBuzz Tech. Each hub features daily content in its respective category from across the Independent Web as well as a newsletter with article highlights that is distributed to the DailyBuzz community.

DailyBuzz features publisher’s content in a unique way, making itself a one-stop-shop for growing your audience and exposing your content to new readers. Because DailyBuzz gives brand advertisers a new way to reach influencers and their communities, it provides you with a source of high–quality advertisements at premium rates.

If your content aligns to the categories mentioned above, click here for additional information and sign-up today!

There are a variety of ways to show ads on your website or blog, even more companies vying for your hard earned internet real estate (ad inventory), and even more companies still trying to make a quick buck as the display advertising dollars shift from more traditional media to new media sources. One thing to understand, the method of advertising I am speaking to is not in the vein of traditional advertising like in a newspaper where you solicit your favorite local shop to pay you a flat rate to show an ad for a finite amount of time. New advertising is dynamic and will show different ads on your site every time a page loads, this works to your advantage. Direct advertising, media buying/selling, and spot buys are all terms associated with more traditional ad sales. These types of relationships require the most effort on your part to solicit and maintain but can also be the most lucrative if you can set them up.

Putting ads on your site can be a daunting endeavor especially with the alphabet soup of terms you need to know just to make some basic educated decisions on how to move forward with new opportunities. CPA, CPM, CPC, CPL, RTB, PPC, SEO, SEM, ETC ETC ETC its enough to drive a person bonkers! You want to be writing that original content that you signed up for not learning some new industry jargon. If you’ll take a moment to embrace a few concepts it will help your strategy immensely.

Page views and impressions are all important terms to understand when understanding online advertising. Every time someone lands on your page this is considered a page view, be careful not to confuse this number with “uniques.” A unique user may view 5 pages on your site i.e. 1 unique can have many many page views. The ratio of unique users to page views on your site is one metric of determining how valuable your traffic may be (more on value in another post). Page views are what lead to ad requests or ad calls, synonyms for when someone lands on your page and if there is an advertiser present on the page the request for an ad to be shown in that location on the page where you specified. Fill rate is the number for the ratio between pages viewed and ad impressions shown. Ideally you want to fill every ad request with a displayed ad or ad impression.

Essentially when someone loads a web page with ad code on your page you’re telling the site to say “HEY ADVERTISER WORK YOUR MAGIC!” Most commonly javascript or iframe “ad tags” are used to facilitate the request of an ad to an ad provider. Ad tags are typically a few lines of code that you can plug into your site or put directly into the HTML to let the site know to look for an ad. These are also commonly referred to as ad zones on your page. The IAB (Internet advertising bureau) is working to standardize ad sizes to make it easy for everyone to play nice together. There are a whole host of standard ad sizes measured in pixels or px. Lijit uses the most common sizes 728×90 or Leaderboard, 300×250 or medium rectangle, and 160×600 skycraper sizes. You’ll need to know what size fits your layout but often times these will fit nicely into just about any standard layout, especially when using blog templates.

Once a person has navigated to your artful hard work on your site, the page has loaded, you’ve got an ad tag on your page and an ad server is called. A LOT of stuff goes on behind the scenes within milliseconds, for the purposes of this article we’ll not dig in to this process right now. A variety of information is passed along in this server request that helps determine not only which ad to show but what the value of the ad to be shown will be. Real time bidding (RTB) as well as a traditional ad chain or waterfall is used to select the advertiser with the highest value for that ad request. Victory! An ad is selected based on all that criteria, an ad is shown, and you’ve just completed an ad impression. This means you make money if you’re using the CPM model of display advertising. Now that we’ve got the initial steps outlined let’s dig into some acronyms.

CPM stands for cost per mille or cost per thousand. For every 1000 impressions you will make $X. For publishers starting out in the advertising world, CPM is easiest method for starting to make money with your site due to the fact that all the hard work is being done by your ad provider (e.g. Lijit). Things to evaluate for ad partnerships are not only the dollars coming in but the experience and service you get from your partners. Having a real live person to email or get on the phone with about how to improve your revenue becomes exceedingly invaluable as you get more complex in your ad strategy. These types of ads can be lucrative for websites with very targeted content and someone at the helm that wants to take the time to try to set up campaigns that match the content of the site to improve the odds of an ad being clicked on, the effort falls on the publisher with this model. Other payment models include CPC (cost per click), which pays you every time someone clicks on the ad that is shown on your page. There are also CPA and CPL ads which stand for cost per action or cost per lead. These types of ads (or websites specifically devoted to the CPL model) require actual interaction from the person on your site to qualify. Often times a form being filled out and submitted determines success for a CPA/CPL ad. CPA/CPL are the most difficult to integrate into an ad strategy due to the amount work involved.

Lastly one other piece of the puzzle is the ad server. In most cases the early blogger or website will not necessarily need the services of a server for their site but it is important to understand why these exist. Ad servers allow the usage of multiple advertising partners for one ad zone (through the usage of default or passback tags) as well as the ability to control which advertising partner gets how many of your ad requests, segment your traffic by geography, and set pricing for each ad request.

Baby steps fearless blogger. This is the basic framework of what you need to know for display advertising on your site. Stay tuned for more 101 information in the coming Lijit blog posts.

For those in the online advertising space who have been to ad:tech before, you know that it’s the networking events that make the conference such a success and this year was no exception. A special thanks to other Lijit partners – Turn, MediaMath, Criteo, RadiumOne and Rocket Fuel who also threw some great ad:tech events!

Check out the great write-up that AllVoices did on the Lijit co-sponsored event – as you can tell, there was tons of fun had by all!

Here are some of our favorite event photos below.

For Internet marketers who’ve been in the business for awhile, guest posting may seem just a little bit passé. It used to be a fairly rare form of marketing, since it was usually a method used by individual bloggers to get the word out there about their blog. Once Internet marketers discovered it could be used as an incredibly effective marketing tool, guest posting took off. Now, however, the ubiquity of guest posting, and its general resistance to being scaled up, means that you’ll have to find other, less traditional ways for building a solid guest post campaign. Having done guest posting for years, here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Identify and reach out to different types of blogs.
   If you want to build a guest post campaign that produces results, you’ll have to identify and appeal to different types of blogs that you reach out to. Many guest bloggers will say that you should tailor your outreach to be very specific to each blogger you want to write a guest post for. While this may be true to a certain extent, many blogs have made it such a standard practice to accept guest posts that you don’t have to take this coy in your approach. You can be much more upfront. On the other end of the spectrum are blogs that have never accepted guest posts before, and may not even know precisely what a guest post is and how it works. These bloggers will take more time and effort in courting them. The bottom line is this—understand who the blogger is and approach him accordingly. Don’t waste your time tailoring a very specific email to a blogger who essential runs a guest post clearinghouse.
2. Expand the breadth of your outreach by using social media.
   Especially for the super-picky, super-high quality blogs, you’ll have to think beyond email when it comes to your outreach. In fact, email alone hardly ever works. Tweeting at different bloggers, sharing information that is relevant to their respective niches, and commenting on different articles on their blog are all different ways that you can get on the blogger’s radar. Then, once you approach the blogger about a possible guest post opportunity, the blogger already knows and trusts you.
3. Don’t ever go into guest posting with the attitude that it’s all about the link.
   While “getting the link” may have been the holy grail when guest posting was in its infancy, now, links don’t matter as much anymore. The quality of the blog where your link is posted matters, but even more than that, the content itself matters. For your guest post campaign to be effective, the content that you publish on different blogs must spread far and wide for your brand to get the recognition that will pull more new customers, curious about your brilliant guest posts, in to your sites and services.
4. Focus on relationship-building with bloggers.
   I’ve touched on the importance of building relationships with bloggers to get a guest post opportunity in the first place. But once your first guest post is published, the relationship should never stop there. Especially when you get published on an A-list blog, maintaining the relationship through Twitter, Facebook, commenting, etc., will give you continued guest post opportunities in the future. It’s much more effective to get several guest posts published on a really good blog than to have one guest post published on millions of blogs that will take anything. Why is this? Simply because better blogs have more cohesive audiences that will be much more likely to share your material, especially once you’ve built that trust.
5. Keep data on everything to understand what works and what doesn’t.
   This recent blog post from SEO MOZ got me to thinking how important analyzing data is in determining what works and what doesn’t. This article conclusively proved or disproved many of the theories that are floating around about how best to approach a guest post campaign. For example, did you know that females who approach bloggers for guest post opportunities are much more successful in response rate than males? Keeping this type of data and analyzing it carefully will help you figure out how to develop your guest post campaign in the future.

In the realm of Internet marketing, guest posting has always been my favorite strategy, simply because it’s much more personable and requires much more thinking than some of the other strategies out there. As long as you are systematic, persistent, and, above all, genuine, you’ll create a successful guest post campaign, too. Good luck!

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

In the last few weeks, there has been a deafening roar from publishers who are getting blind form emails from Google shutting them down from AdSense.  These emails simply state that their content “poses a risk of generating invalid activity.”  For this reason they won’t be paid for content placements Google bought from the publisher months ago.   In other words, while we bought that from you in December, we now aren’t going to pay for that. Wow.

This is super unfortunate.  Google, under their terms of service, certainly has the right to turn off the AdSense accounts of publishers.  In addition, they have the right to withhold that publisher’s revenue from months ago.  And, I suppose they can do that without actually calling or personally emailing you.  It’s amazing how little they care.

Personally, I have never been in an industry where the 800 lb Gorilla behaves in such a reprehensible way.  It certainly feels like Google is “doing some evil.”

Google runs a huge exchange and for many publishers it monetizes well.  But frankly, as a business Lijit requires its partners to really be partners.  And in turn, we extend that same respect to our publishers.  Sometimes we detect fraudulent behavior and we call the publisher, explain the problem, and help rectify it when the publisher doesn’t know.  Sometimes we need to remove a publisher from our network.  But we will always treat you like a partner.

We’re excited to bring this news to Lijit publishers, particularly because Zemanta’s existing tools can be used in conjunction with Lijit’s analytics and reader engagement tools to create more compelling content. Zemanta automatically connects publishers with helpful external content such as images (over 200 million available), links to articles, and terms.  It’s a publisher’s research and distribution tool – guiding publishers to related content based on what you are currently writing about, and suggesting related articles created by Zemanta users when they are semantically relevant.

Over 80,000 online publishers and bloggers use Zemanta – from small niche bloggers to bloggers at CNN and Forbes – so check them out and download today!

ADOTAS –  The online advertising market is booming. The display market in particular is likely to have hit $9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011 – a growth spurt that even on a steep chart looks like a right angle. That’s the good news. The bad news, from a publisher perspective, is that much of that spend is consolidated by a relatively small number of companies (Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Google, and Microsoft). This condensing ad spend runs counter to what the internet is about and why we as consumers spend so much of our time immersed in it.

What does this mean for high-quality, independent, niche and professional publishers that make up the majority of the web? Why are those publishers, authors, creators and curators of some of the best authentic, informational and entertaining content struggling for their fair share of the economics? It’s one of those things that’s simple to understand conceptually, and yet difficult to solve both at the same time.

What do you think? Please feel free to post a comment below or send Walter an email directly.

I got to know Jerome while I was still at Raindance and through the final years of my involvement at Raindance we would often meet for breakfast to discuss my many crazy ideas.  When I started Lijit, Jerome helped me formulate some of the ideas and strategies and when our Angel round of financing needed a little more investment fuel he led High Country into a $200K investment.

Jerome was a tough business guy, and like a lot of tough business guys he had his fans and otherwise.   I was always in the fan category.  When he had something constructive to add around the board table he would add it.  When he didn’t he wouldn’t.  Jerome was a consummate professional.

A few years ago Jerome moved on to San Francisco and Crosslink Capital.  I pitched Crosslink for a late stage investment round but my style didn’t mesh with the other partners at Crosslink.   I believe humility is the best tool as a CEO, but as Jerome counseled me after the fact, that style can appear weak – especially to a Valley VC expecting “ego” to be plentiful.  We found our investment somewhere else but nearly every time I was in San Francisco over the last two years I would meet Jerome for breakfast at the Meridian Hotel near his office.  He always had helpful advice on business and we had great discussions about taking our favorite cars to the track to go fast.

I’m not a friend maker (or collector) by nature.  But I counted Jerome as one of them.

Employees across FMP will lift the curtain and talk about the high level technology behind FMP’s advertiser and publisher products and services.  As Tim Musgrove, Chief Scientist and FMP, states: “we’ll share some of the results, surprises and problems we’ve uncovered along the way, as well as our ideas on where things might go in the future.”

We already have a few posts up about current initiatives at FMP:

• Our very own Todd Vernon, Founder and CEO of Lijit and now EVP of Technology at FMP, provides his thoughts on how FMP’s acquisitions of Lijit, TextDigger, FoodBuzz, and BigTent will help turn FMP into a top 5 media property.
• FMP Chief Scientist Tim Musgrove provides a deep dive into Conversation Targeting (CT), a top technology priority for the company in early 2012.
• Peter Ridge, Senior Director of Product Management at FMP, discusses security requirements for a wireless network.

Please take a moment to check out the new site, and let us know what you think!

Publishers are the core of our business, and because of that we are constantly looking for new ways to deliver higher CPMs and fill rates. When it comes to RTB, the more DSPs we integrate with, the more access brand advertisers have to our publishers’ inventory. The more demand from brand advertisers, the higher the return we can deliver to publishers.

Today we are pleased to announce our latest RTB integration with XA.net, our newest partner. The partnership with XA.net comes on the heels of a handful of other recent integrations with industry-leading DSPs including MediaMath, m6d, Chango, and MyBuys. With these and many more planned for the coming months, publishers should continue to see higher returns from Lijit’s online advertising services.

Feedback?

Lijit sat down with Jared Wunsch to find out some of his tricks of the trade. Read on to see what he has to say…

Q: What was your original goal for DearBlankPleaseBlank.com?

A: We were just two kids in college who liked technology and wanted to create stuff online for fun. We took an “if you build it they will come” philosophy and because we didn’t build the site to make money, we designed it exactly how we wanted to without an ad-focused layout in mind. I think that’s part of why we’ve been able to build such an audience… because they see that we’re truly authentic.

Q: You started DearBlankPleaseBlank.com less than two years ago, and have now grown into four sites with a pretty impressive readership! How were you able to grow your traffic so quickly?

A: We listen to our readers. We spend a lot of time on our sites… learning who our users are, what their demographic is, and the kind of content they want to engage with. We get to know our users by actively participating in the conversation, providing comments, and taking feedback into account. We also try to keep things current based on what’s going on in the world. All of this has allowed us to build a pretty strong community that keeps coming back for more.

Q: How do you monetize your site?

A: We work with a handful of ad partners like Lijit who take care of the monetization piece for us. Because we didn’t have a lot of experience in online advertising, we’ve been lucky to find partners like Lijit that we trust who help walk us through the best ways to optimize our sites. We’ve learned a lot and right now we’re building our own ad platform so that we can control ad network optimization internally. We may layer direct sales on top of our business model someday but neither one of us really wants to go into sales!

Q: What are your goals for the future?

A: It’s funny because when we incorporated display advertising, it was really just to offset the cost of all the servers we needed to buy to support our traffic growth. We just wanted to keep our hobby going, but had no plans to turn this into our “career.” We now laugh about how we’ve been able to turn our hobby into a business and we hope to ride it out for as long as we can. I like to say that we’ll keep putting stuff up as long as people keep looking at it!

Q: What would you say is your biggest lesson learned?

A: Too often online publishers try to build a site around what they think will “sell” but people with that philosophy are doomed to failure. You have to publish content that you like and you’re personally drawn to, otherwise you’re just doing it wrong. Another thing I’ve found that’s pretty funny is you need to build things that people want to see even though sometimes they don’t know they want to see it until they do. We’re always trying out new things and building new sites to see how our readers respond and most of the time we’ve been lucky enough to get a great response.

1. The guarantee/sponsorship/future: Advertisers want the guarantee of being placed next to premium content, above the fold, in front of a guaranteed set of eyeballs, for a specific period of time, at a set rate.  Further, media buyers are tasked with spending 100% of their budgets for fear they are reduced next quarter because they didn’t spend enough.  Without a guarantee in place with publishers, their media spend is at risk of (a) not being spent or (b) being spent in less than ideal context at the end of a fiscal period.  Programmatic buying technology like real time bidding (RTB) provides advertisers/media buyers no guarantee on price, contextual placement, or impression volume.
2. Site takeovers and other non-standard ad units: A site takeover or “skin” is very visible to a reader, generates high CTRs, and creates brand awareness.  Because of this, takeovers have very high CPM rates and cannot easily be bought or sold on an exchange due to the infinite ways for designing and architecting a site.  Likewise, ad units that are not standard IAB sizes (160×600, 300×250, 728×90) can and should be integrated into the unique design and architecture of a site, and sold for premium prices.
3. Banners integrated with content: Below is a banner from Miller Light from my Fantasy Football league that has been creatively integrated with content.  This banner shows the score of the Fantasy game each week and allows Fantasy players to “Smack Talk.”  This must have been an expensive campaign due to the way it is integrated into the site. The more integrated the advertisement is into the content of the site, the less the chance that an algorithm can decide the price programmatically.
4. The leading edge of media technology: While there are emerging exchanges for both video and mobile inventory, nothing yet exists that is as efficient as the market for standard IAB display banners.  Publishers can much more easily package and directly sell media like video, audio, mobile web, and applications than any exchange currently can.  Even as exchanges mature for some of these types of media, there will always be something that is a little newer or more innovative than that which can be quickly commoditized.
5. Conversation: Publishers have their own brand.  And in the age of social media, brands need to be a part of the conversation.  Blog posts, comments, and tweets are where this conversation lives in a public forum.  The influence of a publisher’s brand within the conversation should not be underestimated—marketers are willing to pay a lot for it.  This is something that our sister company, Federated Media Publishing, is pioneering across the Independent Web.

So why in the world would advertisers ever buy programmatically?  It comes down to one thing: audience data.  I will delve deeper into this subject in my next post and explore some ways publishers can manage their programmatic channels more effectively.  Again, the better a publisher is at understanding the distinctions between programmatic and direct, the better the two channels can compliment each other, working together to maximize inventory value and revenue.

The latest version continues to offer all of the tools that we love including the drag and drop interface that removes all the hassle involved with coding a website, the ability to customize all aspects of a page in real-time, as well as some new tools like (you guessed it!) Lijit’s audience analytics. While Flavors.me is a website publishing service that can be used free of charge, upgrading your account to the premium service provides additional tools – like Lijit – that are necessary to make your webpage that much more successful.

If you are a premium Flavors.me user you will be able to get Lijit Audience Analytics, which help publishers better understand their audience so they can make the most out of their Flavors.me website. Publishers can now get access to stats like Audience Demographics and Advertiser Insights which you can’t get anywhere else.

To get started

1. Sign-up for an account at http://www.lijit.com/signup
2. Select “Audience Analytics” from the Lijit tools & services.
3. Copy the code provided and paste it in the “External Stats” section of your stats page on Flavors.me
   
4. Click Complete Sign-up on lijit.com to be taken to your dashboard.

We are excited about this updated release and all the amazing new features such as Lijit’s audience analytics that are now available!

We could speculate as to why they made this decision, but that really does not matter much.

What does matter is the publisher.

We would love to extend an invitation to any publishers who would like to work with us over here at Lijit.

Publishers are our people.

Let us know right away if we can help you continue your revenue stream – especially at the most important time of the year.

Here is more information on our ad services.

Please email us and a member of our publisher development team will be in touch shortly. We look forward to working with you.

Happy Holidays!

Ad Metrics Updates

We made some great refinements to the way we present ad metrics in our publisher dashboards. We pulled together the most important ad metrics we offer publishers and integrated them into the dashboard. It now features not only the normal graphs and stats you expect, but we’ve included charts that show CPM , fill rate, and click performance. This brings all of the metrics you care about into one area and enables you to , at a glance, understand your ad performance.

Universal Stats Support

We finished rolling out our universal stats package to all of our publisher stats. This means that anyone who uses a Lijit product can now get access to all of the analytics we provide.  Publishers who only use our ad services have access to new page view reporting in their Audience dashboard, and will continue to see more stats as we make them available.

Advertiser Insights

In case you missed it, we also recently rolled out our new Advertiser Insights analytics. These cool analytics highlight which brands are engaging with your audience, and help publishers by supporting their direct sales efforts and support development of content to attract brand advertisers. Every Lijit publisher receives this data, so login now and check out which brands are most aligned to your site’s audience.

Looking at 2012

More, more, more. We’re excited about continuing to bring publisher’s the information and analytics they need, and helping them build a business around their publication. We’ll continue to improve our publisher analytics tools, and plan to add even more ways to look at your site and your audience to empower you to be a better publisher.

Our advertising platform will continue to grow to support Lijit’s incredible growth, and you can look forward to world class advertising products appearing throughout 2012. Overall, we’re incredibly excited about what we accomplished in 2011, and can’t wait to show you what we have in store for 2012.

Thank you to all the members of the Lijit band that rocked the house last night as well as John Battelle for making a cameo appearance on the drums. Check out his award winning performance here!

Shout out to Lijit rock-stars Manny Puentes, Mike Meredith, Zach Conger, Janessa Ho, Meaghan Kelly, and Zach Miller for keeping us dancing all night long. Rock on.

The holiday party was a great success and a wonderful way to reflect on and celebrate our accomplishments. Check out the photo above of our CEO Todd Vernon going down the long list of Lijit milestones in 2011.

]]> http://www.lijit.com/blog/2011/12/14/lijit-celebrates-the-holidays-with-an-all-out-bash/feed/ 1 http://www.lijit.com/blog/2011/12/09/team-lijit-goes-go-kart-racing/ http://www.lijit.com/blog/2011/12/09/team-lijit-goes-go-kart-racing/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:04:18 +0000 sonya http://www.lijit.com/blog/?p=2743 Lijit recently hit 400m average daily ad impressions across our network so to celebrate this major company milestone we took the company go kart racing. It was the perfect activity for the Lijit team – a group of highly competitive, active employees who are in it to win it. While many of us were hoping for “bumper car” style which would allow us to throw some punches at each other, we played by the rules and focused entirely on speed.

Our CEO Todd Vernon is quite the race car driver so in the true spirit of intimidation he showed up with his own helmet (note the Lijit sticker on his helmet in the photo below!). We were placed into three different heats and each heat had two chances to make their best time. The 10 fastest racers made it to the finals… and the winner was? Our very own CEO! Check out the picture of Todd below with his winner’s flag.

Some of us are hobbling around today with bruises, soar limbs, and kinked necks but all in all it was a blast and we hope to be celebrating new milestones with another day of go kart racing in the months to come!

Today Lijit released a new tool as part of our audience analytics platform called Advertiser Insights. Advertiser Insights provides publishers with a list of the top brands that align to your site’s readers. Publishers can use this data to support direct sales efforts as well as to develop editorial content that better attracts top brand advertisers. Any publisher using any of Lijit’s services (ad services, analytics, and/or reader engagement tools) now receives Advertiser Insights in their publisher dashboard – just log in today and check it out!

Simple to digest? Couldn’t be easier.

What’s cool about our new Advertiser Insights data is that it highlights the brands that align to your site’s readers, not just your site itself. It aggregates all of the data we have as readers traverse the entire Lijit network, and provides the information back to publishers to apply directly to your site.

With over 150,000 sites and 300 million global uniques, the Lijit Network continues to grow exponentially. We’ve seen a 700% growth in ad calls in 2011 alone, and currently deliver over 11 billion ad impressions each month. Now that’s a lot of reader data we’re trying to reflect back to publishers!

As we look for new ways to help publishers build their business using valuable analytics, we will continue to leverage the power of the Lijit Network to help publishers grow their site and make more money through targeted advertising. To read more about the value of a network, check out a previous blog post from Lijit’s COO Walter Knapp, “For a Publisher, the Network Matters.”