Viral Ad Network

Reading through the RubberRepublic blog, I thought I’d point the whole of team rubber at the article on the semantics of the word “viral” when applied to marketing.

This is a very interesting topic to me. With my leniency towards very specific definitions, I’m going to start right from the start, and explain that I’m certainly not a believer in Wittgenstein’s views on natural language.

To me, it’s not unreasonable to define a strict subset of natural language with a single, well defined, 1-1 semantic value function for discussing technical matters (and I believe the definition of “viral” should fit into such a subset), in the same way that we define mathematical terms in first order logic (I’m not going to get into provability here).

i.e. I think that it’s possible, and reasonable, to define the meaning of individual words which are indisputable and fixed when talking in technical language.

For this reason, it really drives me up the wall when two people talk about something, use the same word, but are actually discussing different things.

An example is how we have recently changed the naming for our “Syndicated Ad Units” (Previously “Content Units”).

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We are currently working on a range of new features to our reporting systems – both for publishers and advertisers.

We plan to make the changes live in the middle of next week (between the 28th and 30th of January), and you may find that your dashboards are not available for short periods during the update.

Importantly, our syndication and tracking services will continue to run during this period, so as a publisher you will continue to earn during this scheduled update.

Similarly to the way other popular networks work, actions counted by our tracking services are not added to publisher dashboards immediatly, and we will be pausing this feature during mainainance of the dashboards. When we re-start this feature there may be a large amount of data for our servers to process, which may take some time, so do not be worried if your numbers look a little low over this period, once the system has finished analysing every action the dashboards will be back to normal.

Tim Wintle