Crenk

Digg has to be one of the biggest web properties currently on the internet, with one of the most loyal communities. However, they seem to be able to grow the community, add on new features, turnover good revenue figures and get millions of pageviews, but they simply can’t sell their company to anyone!

Digg has been trying to sell for the last 6 months and yet no one is actually biting. They currently have a Microsoft as an investor and running their ad campaigns, plus they have been in talks with Google for an acquisition, but how come they cant finalise anything?

Is it because the $300 million price tag they are after, it just too out of reach? Is it because the big conglomerates aren’t too sure how they are going to fit the Digg technology into their search engines or portals? Is it because Digg has such a strong community base, any acquisition will just kill the site?

Im hoping to find out why the average person think Digg cant sell.

With as long as Twitter has been with us, it’s amazing that we’ve not seen a monetizing model sooner. Well…it was bound to happen, and it’s here. Twitter can now display ads, and users can get paid for it with Twittad .

As you look at your account, think to yourself, “I’ve got followers, why shouldn’t I make money for being so popular.” If that’s your train of thought, this little addition to Twitter is right up your alley. Having full control of the ad space, you set the price on the space you are looking to sell andTwittad will match with the advertisers in their database.

Where does the ad go?

Good question, simple answer. The advertisement will sit in the upper left hand column of your Twitter homepage. That big empty space can be used more effectively now by placing an ad that will interest your followers. That’s it, it’s that simple. While some may have feared that the advertisement would have been plastered across your background, or cover the page with flashing, twirling, and otherwise annoying attention grabbers, the simple fact is that the ad will remain unobtrusive.

For the Twitter User

So the first question is obvious, how do I become a part of Twittad? Allowing Twittad to pair you with the appropriate advertiser and marketing promotions can be lucrative and here’s how.

You start off with submitting your page to Twittad for advertisers to purchase (remember you set the price). Once the price is agreed upon select the duration for which you’d like the ad to appear on your page. Now you wait, it can be long or short, but the advertiser must contact you once they are interested. You ultimately have the choice to accept or deny the advertisers offer. If you deny, wait for another offer. If you accept, then simply upload the ad to the design of your template and then notify the advertiser that you are ready to go.

You basically get paid for every hour you serve the advertisement to your followers, and a virtual account will keep track of your earnings. Once the duration of the advertisement has come to an end the virtual account releases the “real” funds to your account. So no worries, you don’t get paid in Monopoly money.

For the Advertiser

Being a part of Twittad is just as easy for the advertiser. All advertisers are able to browse what the users are willing to share and for how much. This gives the advertisers a chance to find the right candidate for their brand and hopefully gain some exposure on the popular micro-blogging site.

Advertisers start off by creating their advertisement using guidelines set by Twittad and following their examples. Once the ad is designed you browse the user database to find the right candidate for your product. You select the “Buy Now” and await their denial or acceptance. Denied? Keep looking. If you are accepted you simply connect and pay via Pay Pal, and if the user removes the ad prior to the agreed upon time, you are credited for the loss. Ultimately the tracking that is provided for the advertisers will alert them if agreements are broken and the advertiser is free to leave negative feedback in such cases.

Twittad receives 5% of the total paid out price as their fee for using their services.

Is This Viable?

I ask myself this question ever since I hear about Twittad. Is this a viable solution to make money on Twitter? Well, sure it can’t hurt to make a little money. The site itself shows how much individuals are making based on duration and follower count. But ultimately, how many people actually travel to your homepage on Twitter? The only time I can think of is when they choose to follow you, but otherwise with all theAPI’s out there, Twitter users are hardly ever on the actual site itself. Perhaps it won’t be long until these web apps we use are filled with advertising. If there’s a way to market, leave to the advertisers to find it.

Here at Crenk we are keen to help as many startups as possible to get their voices heard. Crenk will now be offering a new form of free advertising.

In the sidebar on every Crenk page we now have some free advertising spots to give away to startups every month. I’m not too sure currently how many spots we will be offering, but will probably be around 6.

Who Can Submit To Get A Free Ad Slot: Any startups (doesn’t matter how big or small)

Slots Available: 6

How Often Do They Change: Monthly. 1st of every month we will have some new startups to try

How to Apply: Send us an email (tips@crenk.com). Subject: Crenk Startup Promotion. Add a link to your startup and a review of approx 50-100 words. Additionally, an Ad that is 125×43

The aim of this promotion is to allow startups some free advertising, while promoting useful services to our readers.

We hope you like this new idea, and we look forward to bring you some great startups you have never heard of.

Crenk Team

A lot of people have been talking recently about Performancing Ads, John Chow, Problogger and Shoemoney to name a few. I totally understand the system they are trying to put in place, but is it actually going to work? For a long time people have been saying that Advertising marketplaces are the way forward, but I dont think that the type of marketplace that Performancing ads has will ever work.

Performancing ads simply will add a banner onto your site so that you can self-serve advertising, a full automated system. While at the same time they gather information about your traffic and user demographics. This is meant to automate the system so the publisher doesn’t have to worry about negotiating individual contracts or the advertiser doesn’t have to worry about having a 5 email exchange before they can purchase.

Advertisers will only purchase advertising in this way on sites that are already major players in their niches, solid brands or emerging sites. Thus, it has a very limited return for publishers. A great deal of smaller sites have joined Performancing Ads in the hope that they will sell more advertising.

Selling advertising in this method for small sites simply doesn’t work, because they don’t have the traffic or brand to actually sell. Smaller sites really need to band together in a particular niche and use the safety in numbers method, cause then they will have a much better chance of getting more top quality advertisers with their broader reach.

This method of self service is great for only a very limited few sites. Therefore, I’m sure that Performancing Ads will only be a fad and they will die off soon enough. The only way this platform can work successfully, is if they have a huge amount of publishers, then a marketplace which makes it very simple to purchase across 10 sites for example, while at the same time they increase their sales team.

Currently, Performancing Ads is a company that medium or small bloggers shouldn’t be taking seriously!

RSS advertising has long been an underutilised revenue stream. On Friday Google Launched feed advertising with Adsense, and there has been a lot of buzz around the internet.

• Makeuseof - Google Adsense for Feeds Finally Goes Live
• John Chow - Google Offers Adsense for RSS Feeds
• Webware - Google Quietly Launches Adsense for Feeds
• Daily Blog Tips - Google Adsense for Feeds is Live: Many Doubts Though

Although there might be some issues with migrating a feedburner feed account you are already using for your site, this is highlighted in the Daily Blog Tips link above.

Here at Crenk we have tried to not only sign up for Google Adsense, but also we have gone back to testing another RSS feed advertising provider, Pheedo. Im going to test both of these services at the same time and hope to report on the results. So stay tuned!

Over the past 6 months I have been taking a keen interest in advertising online. Most new ventures are trying to find business models that can sustain them online, but it is quite difficult to know where to start. Advertising is the main form of monetization on the web at present time, and with this being the case there are more and more advertising networks poping up. These networks range from affiliate networks, CPC and even CPM.

In this article I am going to focus on CPM advertising networks. CPM means cost per mille, so every 1000 times your ad is views you earn a certain amount of money. Below is a quick list of some CPM networks that might help new publishers gain some well earned money. Normally, rates can vary depending upon several factors, type of site, type of traffic, locations and more. However, these networks will definitely be able to help you.

1. Adagency1

   

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2. Adpepper

   

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3. AdSmart

   

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4. Adtegrity

   

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5. Ampira Media

   

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6. BannerConnect

   

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7. Bardzo Media

   

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8. BlueLithium

   

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9. BurstMedia

   

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10. Canep Media

    

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11. Casale Media

    

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12. ClickBooth

    

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13. CPX Interactive

    

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14. Gorilla Nation

    

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15. InterClick

    

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16. RealCast Media

    

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17. RealTech Network

    

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18. Tacoda

    

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19. Tribal Fusion

    

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20. ValueClick Media

    

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21. Vibrant Media

    

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For a while now I have been running Adphilia and we are only a small site representation company that is slowly growing. We have spent a lot of time trying to source the right Advertising server to meet our needs, but we still haven’t been able to find the right one in my mind. We have toyed with using free ad servers like OpenX or Google, as well as corporate ad servers like Right Media or Doubleclick. This is a post which just outlines what we have found within the company.

Free Ad Servers:

Open X - OpenX is an amazing piece of software that allows medium and large website to control their inventory. It is cost effective because the software is free, however you need to think about the implications advertising will have on your hosting servers, because huge amounts of ad serving can mean very large bandwidth costs. I also find OpenX a little hard to understand when you are first using the serving, plus I’m sure the larger your sites are the more complicated it becomes.

Google Ad Manager - Google Ad manager is a great product but it is built specifically for small publishers. It has a great design and easy to use. The first issue is that you can only use this ad server for small sites, because it is not compatible with any larger ad servers, and you have to put ad code straight into the header of your site. Additionally, I really don’t like the fact that when you deliver your first campaign you have to set it all up the day before it is allowed to be start. Small but bloody annoying.

Corporate Ad Servers:

Zedo - Zedo is very professional company with some great customer service. However, with them we got caught on the first hurdle, cause they were very expensive compared to all the other companies. Possibly, this is due to the great customer service and the results they can bring your sites. However, if you don’t have a great sales team to match what they can offer, there isnt too much point.

DoubleClick - This company just amazes me. Doubleclick seems to be a mish mash of several individual sections of software that has been mashed into one tool. Instead of Trafficking, reporting, billing and account details all in one sections, they seem to have segmented them, thus making it very untidy. However, they are the worlds best ad serving tool and the most used.

Atlas - Atlas, I tried to contact 5 times and they have never even responded to the messages I left. So I didn’t even get past the pricing stage let alone using their service. Typical Microsoft!

After all of these experiments it didn’t really bring me to finding the ad server solution that I was after. Im wanting a piece of software that is easy to understand and us, which doesn’t cost the earth, preferably free and web based. Does anyone know of a solution that I should try?

Last year AOL paid $275 million for Tacoda. Now, according to Venture Beat, AOL is dropping the brand and rolling the technology into Platform A’s Ad.com unit. This is a move that shows that AOL are trying to actually combined their Ad.com/Platform-A, but are they going about this in the right way? Im also curious to find out what AOL might be doing with the Tacoda technology, because other companies and myself including would be very interested in licensing this technology from AOL! I must admit that these days im sick to seeing ads from Ad.com and other remnant networks, simply because there is no targeting and I know that the publishers are earnings a crazy low CPM for the ads. Thus, the industry is not benefiting from this, neither the publisher, only the ad networks!

For the last few months or so I have been using Google Ad Manager to control the advertising on Crenk. Currently the service is in private beta and you have to be invited to join. Up until a few days ago I was using the service, but since have dropped it and I just thought I would write a short article and let every know why.

The user interface within this very simple to use ad server is great. It is very easy to use and even easier to understand. Google Ad Manager has some great targeting tools which you would expect from Google. That all being said the one thing that is completely useless with the service is when it comes to implementing the ad tags into your site. Currently, the only ad tags they offer are in html code, so you need to add the code straight into your websites code and cannot add to another third party ad server. Thus, making it completely useless for the majority of people to use. I know the majority of small sites are able embed code straight into their site, but once a site gets quite large, you normally have several third party networks running. Thus, needing to control these networks with a high end ad server like Doubleclick or Atlas. This option is just not there with Google Ad Manager. I would definitely recommend it to small websites, but if you are either a large website, ad network, network of sites and anything else but a small single publisher, then Ad Manager is not for you!

Technorati, one of the worlds largest blog search engines has spent a long time trying to find a new model for their company and today I think they have launched a great offering. Introducing Technorati Media. Technorati Media is the new blog advertising network for anyone and everyone. The advertising network will not open fully for another couple months, but you can apply now and hopefully get in early.

Technorati has been testing their ad network for a while already and seem to have found some good results. The ads will be sold by CPM method, in which allow a little more security for publishers within the network. Im always interested when new blog networks enter the market and I cant wait to see what results come from this new network. Here at Crenk we have already signed up to this service, so cant wait to report to everyone our findings.