Viral Ad Network

As a publisher, you may sometimes wonder why your actions can take a while to show up on your dashboard.

In the interest of transparency I’ll explain how our stats systems work from a high-level, and why your payments aren’t affected by system maintenance.

When designing our ad-serving and tracking systems, our top priorities are generally:

1. Accurately recording the number of actions
2. Serving ads onto your page quickly
3. Ensuring fraudulent publishers can’t abuse our systems to take money they don’t deserve from our advertisers.

Detecting invalid actions (of which fraud is only a small minority) is not a simple task – and it can take a significant amount of computing power to analyse the volume of actions we receive.

If we attempted to categorise and analyse all actions as soon as they occurred[*] then we would struggle to serve ads (and record actions) on your websites during traffic spikes.

To avoid this (and to ensure the ad network can carry on serving during maintenance and updates), we separate our systems into (constantly running) high performance ad serving and action tracking systems (which simply record preliminary data) and systems which perform analysis of this data.

The analysis systems periodically analyse the preliminary data and use as much computing power as they have available to update our main databases. If there is not enough computing power available (or if we are in the middle of scheduled maintenance) then the analysis will wait until a later time before updating the databases.

I hope this high-level description has helped explain the delay between actions occurring and being displayed in your dashboards – and why our dashboard updates don’t affect your monthly payments.

Tim Wintle

[*] – it’s worth noting it would technically be impossible to fully analyse actions immediately – some analysis can only be done in bulk, after your actions are recorded.

The viral charts that we put together for New Media Age have featured in this weeks magazine – on page 11

The top 5 entries of our Viral Brand Chart and our Viral UGC Chart are listed along with their views, tweets and facebook shares.

Also one of our directors, Chris Quigley, is speaking at NMA live on Friday on Viral Marketing De-mystified. You can book tickets to the event here.

Cheers then.

It’s the WORLD CUP – Hooray! But you’re stuck in the office and itching to see some football action. Spare a thought for DudeCorp:

COME ON ENGLAND!

http://dudecorp.com

I’ve just put the finishing touches to a new tutorial for advertisers

making a basic flash video ad in actionscript 3.

This tutorial includes:

1. Calling the Viral Ad Network’s tracking from actionscript
2. Embedding an image inside flash
3. Inserting a basic video into flash

At the Viral Ad Network we love a good read! Our book shelves are laden with the best writings from the worlds of development, advertising, design, business and more. Some people like to systematically read through a book, one at a time. I prefer to read a few on the go and dip in and out. Here are a couple of books I’m reading at the moment:

1. The Best Software Writing I by Joel Spolsky
2. The Smashing Book by Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman
3. Designing The Moment – web interface design concepts in action by Robert Hoekman, Jr.
4. Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy
5. Attention And Interest Factors In Advertising by Harold J Rudolph
6. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan

Let us know if you have any reading recommendations – leave a reply below, or send us a tweet.

You can find out more on interesting reading at the Rubber Republic Book Club or even sign up for the Rubber Library.

At the beginning of the year I posted a link to Mashable, reporting that Twitter’s traffic was failing to increase, and had for several months.

Wondering if this was still the case, I ran my own analysis – not of the traffic to Twitter (which only Twitter themselves can measure accurately), but of the number of user accounts on Twitter – over the two year period from 29th May ‘08 – 29th May ‘10

Interestingly, I saw the same slump in new signups that Mashable had spotted on Quantcast’s traffic stats – from July ‘09 – Feb ‘10.

Even more interestingly, I found that new users suddenly jumped from Feb 2010, and have been increasing ever since!

So what’s going on here?

When we first saw traffic going down, many of us suspected that Twitter may have been approaching market saturation (the point where all people who wanted to tweet already had accounts). This suspicion seems to have been wrong.

My suspicion now is that we’re seeing the effects of two loosely-coupled markets – one, smaller, market approaching saturation; another (larger) market where Twitter is beginning to take off.

I know we have some readers who know far more about such models than I do – I’d be really interested in hearing if anyone has a good model that could explain this behaviour.

And, for completeness, here’s a chart of how the total number of users on Twitter has changed over the past two years (note this includes inactive and banned accounts).

Got lots of love for this film. An infographical adventure around a whiteboard from the RSA. It summarises a talk by Dan Pink on ‘the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace’.

Class