online advertising Archive

Yesterday Twitter announced that it will be against their terms of service to post advertisements using a third-party service. Initially the thought was services like SponsoredTweets would be out of business in 30 days when the new rules go into place. But alas, the new rules only apply if you aren’t posting your ads directly on the twitter.com website. As I noted last night, all the people who get fat bankrolls using this method will be able to continue but will have to run the ads manually. Frankly there really is no change if this roundabout method remains.

I’ve written in the past that I think most of the content on Twitter is advertisements but it really bears repeating with the new changes that Twitter is looking to implement. Twitter noted in their post yesterday regarding the advertising terms change, “for this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.”

Continue reading “Is Twitter Simply One Big Advertisement?” »

Comic creator Guhmshoo has done it again – this time he takes a look at the real Twitter ad strategy. No, not the one that launched today where companies can buy tweets in Twitter search results and in user’s content streams.

Many have asked me for my thoughts on the new Twitter ad network. I will have some thoughts later this week (Starbucks has great coffees and teas). I want to do more research (fly with Virgin America today) and look into (Best Buy has great deals on MP3 players) whether this sytem will actually be used and whether it (lose 10 pounds today with liposocialsuction) will drive any actual tangible results.

Until then, check out Twitter ad network commentary from Patricia Handschiegel and Peter Kafka’s interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the AdAge conference in NYC.

We’ve covered several of Guhmshoo’s cartoons including Happy Dependence Day and the shilling bloggers.

I just received the email below from Yahoo regarding their Yahoo Publisher Network which they have announced will be closing in a month — April 30, 2010 to be exact. The Yahoo Publisher Network was supposed to be just like Google’s AdSense product.

I tried the Yahoo Publisher Network on all of my sites but eventually moved it to only one slot on HTMLCenter. The results were so poor that it almost made sense not to run any ads at all over running the Yahoo Publisher Network. It would be great if Yahoo would provide an overview of why they were never able to get good paying quality ads for their publishers as it might help other ad networks with their fill rates and CPM offerings.

If you are running Yahoo Publisher Network code, you must remove it by April 30, 2010 or nothing will be displayed in the ad slot. Interestingly Yahoo is pushing their publishers to Chitika for search ads. Robin from Techcrunch wonders why Yahoo didn’t push publishers to Microsoft’s ad platform considering their search deal. Perhaps Chitika paid for the promotion? No idea, but Robin’s question is a good one.

There’s no note on the Yahoo Publisher Network website regarding the closure and it appears you can still apply for the program as of the time of this post.

Continue reading “There Goes Another One…Yahoo Publisher Network to Close” »

The Apple iPhone developer’s blog has an interesting entry from yesterday that discusses location-based advertising in iPhone apps. The usage of GPS functionality to deliver local information must provide “beneficial information” to the user.

The entry notes (my emphasis), “If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.”

MacNN has a good look into what this decision means for developers and for Apple. “Many analysts believe Apple is preparing to launch a mobile advertising network that will serve ads through free apps on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The company recently acquired Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising specialist, after reportedly failing to sign a deal to purchase AdMob. The latter company was later picked up by Google,” MacNN notes.

Continue reading “Want to Run Location-Based Ads in Your iPhone App? Not So Fast.” »

Last year, top 100 tech blog Techcrunch added a “meta refresh” to their homepage which allowed your Internet browser to refresh the homepage at specific intervals of time without your instruction. This refresh serves two purposes:

• it allows readers who leave their browser open to the Techcrunch.com site to always view the latest stories when they return to the page
• it allows Techcrunch to add monetizable pageviews to their ad base

After what appears to be a bad hacking event last night (I feel for their staff as I know all too well about hacking over the past year), Techcrunch appears to have added an “interstitial” advertisement. Interstitial ads are basically ads that are placed on pages between the content. In this case, the ad displayed below is presented to a user upon the first load of techcrunch.com, but doesn’t appear again.

Technically, code on the techcrunch.com home page pushes users to the interstitial ad if they don’t have the cookie which tells the server that they have already seen the ad. Also, it appears the ad is running through Google Ad Manager and appears to be a custom campaign with Blackberry (congrats to their team on the ad sale).

With all the traffic from discussions about the hack, to the big Steve Jobs iTablet/slate/whatever event tomorrow, that Blackberry interstitial ad should provide for some very nice income for CEO Heather Harde and team.

Continue reading “Everything Old Is New Again…Techcrunch Adds Interstitials” »

Over the first two weeks of this new year, I’ve noticed more malicious advertising than last year. Online advertising network optimizer Rubicon Project has announced the launch of a new security service named Rubicon Security that aims to reduce the number of malicious ads across the Web.

Rubicon receives data from ClickFacts regarding malicious ads and then processes the information against ads being served through their network to help lessen the possibilty that a malicious ad will ever be seen by a consumer.

From the announcement, “ClickFacts Ad Network and Publisher Management Suite enables Rubicon Security to automatically scan all ad tags, advertising creatives and publisher pages for content and malware before delivering advertisements, allowing publishers to manage the high volume of ad tags on any given page while dramatically reducing the potential of malicious attacks. Additionally, Rubicon Security continues to monitor the ad tags once they are served to ensure malware doesn’t attack the campaign.”

When malicious ads are served, they can damage not only a user’s computer but also the reputation of the website or brand. Also, by removing the malicious ads, Rubicon can serve legit ads which are more likely to be better paying as well.

The Rubicon Security service only works for publishers within the Rubicon network. Also of note, Rubicon is now describing their company as, “the Internet advertising infrastructure company.”

Yandex has started powering search contextual ads on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Here is a screenshot and link to search result page on Bing.com for a search query “Туры” (Tours) that displays Yandex.Direct advertisements both above the Bing.com’s search results and alongside them (to the right).

Yandex has announced a deal with Microsoft’s search engine Bing on its blog. The Yandex.Direct ads has been tested on Bing since September 2009.  The blog post said that “in so far, a share of Bing in Russia is not that big, but [Yandex] is very glad that one of the world’s largest companies has decided to monetize in RuNet with a help of Yandex’s contextual technologies”.

Bing holds 0.8% search market share in Russia, behind Yandex with 58.3%, Google with 23.0%, Mail.ru with 10.2%, and Rambler with 3.8%, according to LiveInternet.ru. Yandex held 54.5% of searches in Russia, Google – 34.5%, Mail.ru – 7.4%, Rambler – 1.9%, Bing – 0.4%, said comScore last August.

Since the Russian contextual advertising market is vauled at $400 million per year, Yandex powering search ads on Bing will translate in several million in additional annual revenues for both Yandex and Microsoft.

Continue reading “Yandex to Power Search Ads on Bing” »