Going to SNAP Summit 2.0

We're going to be at the SNAP Summit 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday ().

Here are some snazzy pictures of myself (Gates) and Jasper, the publisher relations team here at Cubics.

If you're a publisher or an advertiser, we'd love to hear from you. We'll be walking around in bright blue Cubics shirts, so we should be easy to pick out.


Please drop us a line if you like to catch up for sit-down. Just e-mail us, attn: Gates.

New Ad Formats on Facebook

Hello Cubics Developers;

Over the past several weeks, Facebook has contacted all ad networks regarding the content and layout of advertisements displayed in Facebook applications. They have set forth guidelines for the displaying of ads that will allow for the continued monetization of applications while protecting the Facebook user experience.

Cubics has gone through great measures to comply with these regulations and will continue to work with Facebook as the platform continues to mature.

The regulations for ads displayed on Facebook that were provided to us are:

• No use of a Facebook style button, including the Facebook blue color and the arrow image.


• No use of generic calls to action including “continue” & “next”


• No “crush” style ads or ads that mislead users to think that a friend or other facebook user has completed an action or has an interest in them specifically.


• No ads with false statements such as “You just won an Ipod”.

Below is an excerpt from our correspondence with Facebook:

“Developers running these ads are in violation of Facebook Terms of Service, so we are asking all advertising networks running on the Facebook Platform to prohibit these ads immediately.…Where we continue to see these ads we'll need to approach developers directly and ask them not to run them, and in some cases, impose an enforcement step such as a moratorium on access to Facebook Platform functionality.”

If you see any ads running on Cubics that you feel violate the above guidelines or if you have any questions regarding the policies or the actions we have taken, please contact publisher support at cubicssupport@adknowledge.com

Thank you;
The Cubics Team

Shiny new servers

So it's finally happened. Cubics' software has left the Alberta Foothills and moved to Kansas City.

Our co-loc in Edmonton was having all kinds of problems meeting our service requirements (bandwidth and hardware issues). So during the week of February 18th, we quietly moved all of our traffic to new servers with better network hardware on a much better co-loc over here in Kansas City. Since then, we've added more servers to effectively double our capacity, and we have even more servers already on the way.

So what does this mean?

For our publishers it simply means that we're expecting less down-time and less latency on displaying the ads. It also means that we're better equipped to handle the loads when MySpace comes on-line March 13. We now have a co-loc that can deal with the increased load.

This also gives us more computing power for improved targeting. Better targeting generally means more advertising variety and more room for higher-paying, highly-specific ads.

However, targeting and latency tend to work against each other, b/c every level of added targeting makes it one step more complicated to retrieve the ad. When you're displaying 50,000 ads / minute, even small changes can have a big impact.

We already have some new targeting software, we'll be releasing it soon.

Of course, reporting will also affected, more power means that we'll be providing you with better reporting tools. To whit, we're targeting a release of country-level traffic details sometime next week.

So subscribe to the feed and check back here for more details.