Wednesday, July 23, 2008

10B monthly impressions, MySpace Virality

2 Big pieces of news. The first is that we've just made a press release regarding monthly impression counts. We're now doing 10B monthly impressions:



"Our massive reach allows advertisers to get their message out to an extremely
large number of online consumers in an environment where they spend a large
portion of their time,"
says Dwayne Lafleur, General Manager of Adknowledge
Social Advertising


We're also launching a new "promo" on MySpace.

EDIT (2008-07-24): a more detailed press release here.

The MySpace application platform does not contain many of the viral features of the other platforms. So we are launching a system that allows them to monetize their MySpace application and build their user-base simultaneously. Adknowledge now matches 100% of money that MySpace application developers earn from their application in free advertising for that application. Our goal with this offering is to help grow the entire application platform on MySpace and make it as vibrant as the Facebook platform.

This initiative is currently slated to run until the end of August. We may run it out further or produce other similar offerings based on feedback and overall success.

Details: for this to work, we need to connect your publisher account to your advertiser account. The easiest way to do this is to go here and login. You'll be taken to a screen for "linking" an existing advertiser account or creating a new one.
  1. If you have an existing advertiser account, you simply need to enter your user name and password and we'll link to this account.
  2. If you do not have an advertiser account, enter a password for that account (bottom) box and click the Create button to create a new acount.
  3. If you have multiple publisher accounts, you can connect each publisher account using method 1.

Once you've made the connection you'll be ready to receive deposits into your advertiser account. Each day at noon we'll make a deposit equal to the previous day's earnings on MySpace traffic.

If you're having any difficulties with getting set up, please leave a comment on this blog or drop us a line.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

New Facebook, new Ad size

The new Facebook profile re-design is well underway. Based on the information we have at this time, the new page width will be 760 pixels. This opens up the opportunity for a new popular ad format: the Leaderboard. Leaderboards are 728 x 90.


The leaderboard effectively takes up the width of the new canvas and adds a few more pixels of height. If you were using the Facebook Banner or the standard Banner, the Leaderboard is the ideal substitution for the new profile redesign.


If you're using our other supported platforms you're also encouraged to use the leaderboard. MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo also have similar page widths, so it's a good match.

Why change?

  1. Appearance
    The Facebook Banner fills the page left to right, that format was launched because developers wanted to use this whole space.
    The Leaderboard will fill the same role after the re-design.

  2. Popularity
    Big Advertisers really like the Leaderboard and they're willing to pay more for these ads. This format has been a highly requested feature for quite some time.
Why now?
Yes, MySpace and others have been able to support this size for quite some time. However the largest chunk of our traffic is still on Facebook. Too many ad sizes makes for too much advertiser work. We've held off on this change to ensure sufficient reach for our advertisers.


The Facebook redesign gives us the opportunity to benefit both our publishers and our advertisers, so we're launching this format.


How do I get these?
Get your new ad code by logging in to your Cubics Publisher account and clicking on the Place Ads button. Select your platform and you'll see the new size listed in step 4 (see image below).

While you're there, please take the time to track your apps. The Cubics system will optimize ad placements at the app level, we're also rolling out reporting at this level. If you're already updating your ad code, now is the easiest time to get your AppId in there as well.



Sunday, July 6, 2008

Cubics down-time

Cubics was down for three hours this afternoon (Sunday, 2008-06-07).

It was an issue at the data center level, affecting hundreds of web servers. At the moment, it looks like data is current and intact.

It's a long weekend here in the US, so we'll have a better idea of what happened tomorrow.