Archive for: Advertising
In the last few weeks a new advertising service has been slowly emerging and has signed some of the power blogs around the blogosphere already, that service is BuySellAds. I came across their service a couple days ago via BloggingTips, and thought I would let all our readers know about their service.
Buysellads are basically an advertising marketplace or a serlf-service platform which allows publishers and advertisers to meet in one single location and automate all of their advertising needs. The platform itself is not overly new, because it has been done in a similar way by Adbrite for many years now. However, that being said Buysellads is blog specific at present and has a more professional and better layout style than Adbrite.
Currently Buysellads take a 25% cut from all advertising purchased across their platform, which isnt niether high or low, because more of their competitors charge in the region of 20-30% as their standard fees, eg Blogads.
Buysellads does I think have a better understand of what is required when it comes to blog advertising. On the publishers individual pages they have details stats like alexa ranking, compete ranking, delicious, technorati and inbound links. This allows the advertisers to gain more of a feel about the popularity of a site.
Publishers can set the number of ads which will be displayed in an ad zone and you can also sell more ads than are being displayed and simply put the ads in rotation. All ads are sold on a monthly basis and you can decide yourself whether banner ads use the nofollow tag.
The entire system is automated, thus allowing advertising to interact where appropriate, and allowing publishers not to have to worry about controlling advertisers schedules, invoicing, credit control, etc etc.
BuySellAds is still in a beta stage at the moment however the standard of websites seems to be very high so don’t be alarmed if your blog isn’t accepted (sites are reviewed individually). Current sites already using the service, bloggingtips, freelance switch, psdtuts, logopond and cssmania.
Im thinking about trying our Buysellads for myself so I can let everyone know if they perform or not. Should I try to get into their beta?
I thought about writing a great long article for this, but then thought nah. Therefore, im just going to cut to the chase and provide you guys with an amazing list of the best CPM advertising networks in the market today. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille, which is 1000. Therefore, they are networks that focus on providing advertising in which publishers receive a certain amount of money for every 1000 times an ad is viewed.
Intermediads is a new service just launched in closed beta. It has been developed by the guys over at TheNextWeb.
Since the services is still in closed beta I thought I would quote the guys who made the product, instead of just trying to give you a review of a product im yet to use. If you would like to see what the service does, head over the Next Web website and have a look at their 125 x 125 banners in the right sidebar.
When we started this blog and sold the first few 125×125 buttons we immediately started wondering how to provide more value to our advertisers. We noticed how difficult it was for advertisers to tell their stories and pitch their companies in such a small area.
As you can imagine that small rectangle gives both readers and advertisers very little information. Right now the ‘click or don’t click’ decision is a very black and white situation. As a visitor you either click or you don’t and if you do you take a gamble with your time. What we wanted to do is provide more information to visitors before they click without making the ads bigger.
This service will definitely improve click through rates and hopefully increase more targetted click throughs.
Here at Crenk we have been a part of the Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network from the very beginning. Crenk has reported about this blog network a couple of time when announcing the addition of Nick Ricci and also the initial launch of the network.
At the very beginning some journalists were discussing the possibilities of Forbes paying CPM rates of anywhere between $10 – $20. Initially I thought these CPM rates were very optimistic and now I can report that this hasnt been the case here on Crenk. CPM rates has been a bit lower, but overall I think the network is definitely moving in the right direction. The advertisers that are currently involved are of a very high standard and im sure this will only grow.
I would also like to hear confirmation about whether the network blogs will have any of their content syndicated across the Forbes network of sites. There has been a lot of rumours about this and it would be great for some smaller blogs to actually get their voices heard for a change.
Today Om Malik has talked about CPM advertising rates and how Pubmatic have release their own analysis of over 1 billion ad impression from over 3,000 publishers.
- eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped dramatically by 52% from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April 2008.
- Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April.
- Small Web sites managed to improve their monetization, increasing from $1.17 in March to $1.29 in April.
“The overall trends you pick up from report are not that surprising. For instance, the improved monetization of small websites because they have more focused content presents more targeted advertising opportunity. Again no surprise that Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47% from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Too much damn inventory. You can get the full report here.” Om Malik.
After launching Adphilia we have noticed that a lot of smaller publisher are getting very high CPM rates, thus this price index seems to be in order. However, I find it quite interesting to hear that these smaller publishers think that as they grow their CPM rates will remain the same, when this doesnt really seem to be the case. Therefore, hopefully from these findings most smaller publishers will realise as their sites grow their CPMs will drop.
It has been reported that Radio One has signed a deal with AllHipHop.com to sell advertising on their site for the next five years. The agreement provides Interactive One, Radio One’s digital division and exclusive agreement to sell all of AllHipHop’s ad inventory. Advertisers who already run ads on AllHipHop will have more access to the Radio One system and also their advertising opportunities. Currently AllHipHop has over five million monthly users in which will lead to a good return for Radio One who are trying to broaden their reach in the African-American hip hop audience. Last month it bought social network operator Community Connect and launched NewsOne.com, an African-American news site.
I would like to welcome everyone to the new Crenk design. Before I run through the new features of the design I would like to thank our designer and coder, Astrit. Astrit has a great company which really helped us make our ideas become reality.
As you will notice with the new Crenk the design and branding has completely changed and become a lot more simplistic. The logo and tag line has remained the same as well as the highlighted red colour. However, in terms of basic navigation there are a lot of changes. Navigation now is more recognisable on this design and each channel is easier to navigate into. Additionally, you will noticed that we now have our most recent article list in the left column. This is aimed to help making content easier to find within the design.
The other major changes are in terms of advertising. Crenk now has a top 728 x 90 banner in which acknowledge some of our main sponsors. Additionally, a 300 x 250 banner can be found in the right column, as well as a 160 x 600 at the bottom of the left column. Crenk is very thankful for our sponsors because they are the ones that help us stay in business. Finally, we are going to open 125 x 125 advertising which will be located in the right column above the 300 banner. If anyone is interested in one of those positions, please drop us an email and let us know.
Finally, I would like to welcome our new contributor Abdylas, who will be adding to our You’ve Been Crenked section which focuses on startup reviews. Keep and eye out for more contributors in the near future, additionally if you are interested in joining the Crenk team please drop me an email and let us know why you would be a good addition to the team.
Well I hope you all like the new design, but im sure that is not going to happen. If you have any ideas or feedback you would like to add, it would be much appreciated.
It has already been reported by the BBC and the New York Times that Google should become the largest advertising seller in the UK by the end of the year.
Google earned $803 million, about £407 million, in the United Kingdom in the first quarter. If you assume that rate won’t grow, that makes £1.6 billion for the year. And since Google’s British earnings are up 40 percent from a year ago, it is a safe bet it will grow.
That means Google will overtake the ITV television network as the biggest seller of advertising in Britain this year, Mr. Cellan-Jones figures. ITV sold about £1.5 billion of advertising last year.
This year Morgan Stanley estimates Google’s total advertising revenue will be $21.9 billion. Excluding the payments it makes to companies that display its ads, Google’s total ad revenue will be $15.7 billion. Time Warner, the largest media company in the world, earned $8.8 billion in advertising revenue last year. Viacom had $4.7 billion in ad revenue last year.
I have been thinking the same thoughts for a while now, that is I think the next place to boom in terms of the internet is display advertising and whoever can actually get that right, will be challenging the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in the next 3-5 years.
Yesterday I wrote about the Rubicon Project and how they have launched into public beta. The site itself is amazing. Overall it is a brilliant package that has been put together for over a year by a dedicated team of about 40 members. This all being said, yesterday I did a test of their service and received mixed results. The code in which I implemented into my sidebar worked fine, except the placements that didnt work at all was the 728 at the top and the 160 at the bottom of the sidebar. Now, why launch a product into public beta, if it doesnt actually work at all?
Has anyone else had the same problems with the Rubicon Project?
AOL has acquired Sphere. Sphere is a technology that increases the relevant articles, blog posts and content to websites, via their widget. Sphere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL, the company said in a statement, part of the programming division led by Executive Vice President Bill Wilson. AOL–along with Newsweek, Time, Reuters, GigaOM, The Wall Street Journal, and other sites–already was a Sphere partner.
This is a very interesting acquisition, because the Sphere technology can be very useful for the larger conglomerates and because Google and Yahoo already have this kind of technology, that only left AOL and possibly Amazon left. The deal im sure will see more AOL content floating across it, while AOL will also be using the technology in amongst their services and finally, Platform-A will have some more ad inventory to sell.
Rubicon Project is now in public beta and has even named their product, Automatic. Automatic is their ad network optimiser and for this service they will be charging 10% of your ad revenue, but say they can increase your CPM and fill rates. We will see if this works! For a while now I have been in their private beta, and im very curious to see if their service actually works and by how much.
According to Allen over at CenterNetworks, AOL is announcing that their Platform-A advertising network has just signed an exclusive agreement with Verizon. Under the agreement AOL will manage the mobile and online advertising for Verizon exclusively, but there is no real indication wether is agreement was provided on a total amount of impressions.
