My name is Niyi and I’m the Founder of Trafficspaces (I’ll get to what Trafficspaces does in a second).
Focus on that quote. Itis quite seems particularly poignant in the current economic environment. It seems like no matter what we do, our dependence on oil just seems unassailable, even to our own detriment. It seems to me like we have a love-hate relationship with the “black gold”. Without it, we can’t seem to power anything. In fact,without it, we’ll all probably lose our jobs!
Advertising is pretty similar. Many people dislike ads on websites (especially the annoying banner ads) but unfortunately, the truth is that without ads, most websites, blogs, will go out of business and mass-appeal tools like the Google search engine, Gmail, Facebook, and possibly even Twitter will be unsustainable. I shudder at every “Catch the Monkey” ad like everyone else so I’ve been particularly intrigued to discover if there is a middle ground somewhere – something that gives publishers more control over what appears on their site and doesn’t leave them short-changed by some dodgy, fly-by-night ad network.
My team and I have just created a new ad management platform called Trafficspaces. We’ve solved three common problems:
1. Losing potential advertisers
“If you build it, they’ll come”. So true, but if they come and they are ready to pay, and you are not ready, they’ll leave (and may not come back). Way too many potential advertisersare lost because publishers expect them to fill a form in order to advertise. Where is the automation?
Imagine if you had to call an airline over the phone in order to book a flight, and there was no Expedia, Orbitz,Ebookers etc. It will be a pain and the airlines will make less money.
I once spoke to a very large newspaper firm who relied mostly on Google for ads on their website. They received a $5,000 check every month from Google and they weren’t impressed. It turns out that their site generates about 10 million impressions per month and understandably they felt short-changed.“I wonder how much Google got paid by the advertiser” ranted their Online Editor.
Recently, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch mused about dumping his long term partner Federated Media because his advertisers (who had to go to Federated Media’s site to place ads with Techcrunch) were spending a disproportionate proportion of their budget with other sites on FM’s network. Basically, if Techcrunch had its own self-service system, they’ll keep more of the advertiser’s budget.
The point there is that publishers need more control. The traffic that cannot be filled by your direct sales, or through your self-service system can be sent to Google or any other ad network. This is particularly important for those who get a lot of site-targeted ads. That is the best way to maximize your revenue.
3. Managing ad operations easily
This part is actually quite important because a lot of publishers I know don’t want to get bogged down with the intricacies of monitoring ad campaigns, optimizing the ads, and preparing reports. They don’t want the complexity that comes with OpenX. They just want to approve the ads with one-click and forget about it. “Keep it Short and Simple” as a close friend said to me. If you are one of those publishers, then Trafficspaces is for you.
Conclusion
Our goal was to give publishers more control. More control over what appears on their sites, and more control of their revenue. But most importantly, it had to be done through a system that was easy to use. The response so far has been great.
Are you looking for new ways to make money from your online videos, then maybe Adap.tv might be the way forward. Adap.tv empowers online publishers to efficiently monetize and grow their online video business. The Adap.tv OneSource video ad management platform provides a simple, transparent way to manage and serve ads from multiple sources, in many formats, to capture the full revenue potential of online video content. Fine-grained control and detailed reporting help publishers maximize their online video performance. All through a single, highly efficient platform.
Adap.tv works with a lot of advertising option including post roll, pre roll, overlay banners, expanding overlay and post roll banners. Although all of this technology isn’t really new for monetizing videos, Adap.tv seems to have some good options that could potentially really help in your quest for a quality video advertising solution.
Some of you may already know that I’m CEO at Insomnia which ownes a Site Representation firm called Adphilia. I wanted to announce on Crenk that we have been making some key changes to Adphilia over the last few months that has produced some amazing results.
Adphilia is not like your normal advertising network, we dont just aim to fill as many impressions as possible with our advertisers, we aim to find the types of advertising that best fits your site and then find solutions to fill these advertising slots. Currently, we work mainly with CPM campaigns, but we also have various CPC, CPA and sponsorship opportunities, which mix to make the optimum solution for each publisher. We believe that no two publishers are the same and everyone has different goals and option with regards to their advertising solutions.
Adphilia has just launched a new website, which is a very simple corporate site that explains in better depth what we do and how we do it. At Adphilia we have recently partnered with Zedo as our ad serving solution and this has allowed us to take our firm to the next level.
In terms of stats Adphilia had an amazing December, reaching over 100 million ad impressions. Currently, our predictions for January end to be over 140 million ad impressions sold. Adphilia is currently seeing a huge growth in impressions every month, which most networks are also seeing, but the difference is that with Adphilia we have seen an increase in our eCPM rates for our publishers and this is going completely against market trends.
Adphilia is always looking for more advertisers who would be interested in advertising on our great publisher sites, and additionally publishers are always welcome to join our network if their brands meet our standards. Im intending to update everyone about Adphilia via Crenk in the future, so stay tuned for more info.
I have been receiving a lot of emails lately from webmasters using Technorati Media as their ad network. Techn0rati is a blog search engine which launched an ad network back in June last year. At the time it was very big news, because Technorati was losing its way a little bit and also traffic at the same time. Thus, they launched Technorati Media which would open up a new revenues stream. At the same time Technorati purchasedAdEngage which would be the backbone of the Technorati Media platform. AdEngage is a basic self service advertising platform which deals in CPC display advertising.
Anyways, Technorati Media launched their ad network with a lot of media attention and were offering some amazing CPM rates, in which was going to entice a huge amount of small and medium blogs. However, now since the economy is in a bit of a decline ad revenues have dropped but this is nowhere near the amount Technorati Media’s CPM rates have dropped.
I’m not too sure what Technorati Media is trying to achieve because using the current model they have for advertising, I’m sure they will be in a huge amount of trouble come the end of 2009. The economic crisis is not going to be fixed over night and it will take a couple of years to sort itself out, so Technorati please think of another advertising solution. CPC campaigns are great for advertisers because they get an instant return on investment for their money, but CPM is great for publishers because they can see a return on their investment. Technorati Media is struggling even to sell CPC campaigns even with some great sites on board, so this spells big trouble!
Disclosure: Im CEO of Adphilia which is a site representation company.
Skimlinks is a new tool that allows web publishers to easily control thousands of affiliate networks in one place with one simple plugin. Affiliate market is all based on the CPA advertising model which is cost per acquisition. In other words when someone purchases a product and comes from your site then you get a percentage of the revenues.
Skimlinks simplifies signing up to hundreds of different networks and then having to check all the stats from these networks. Skimlinks seems like a simple fix to an annoying problem.
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.
“Oil is to the global economy what advertising is to the web ecosystem. Cut it off and the whole thing shuts down”
at their convenience. Facebook and Myspace have spent millions doing exactly this. Most publishers can’t afford to do and that’s were Trafficspaces steps in. You can get your own white-labelled self-service ad platform from $4.99 a month.
