Viral Ad Network

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

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).

New Media Age is the UK’s leading weekly interactive media publication, so the perfect partner for the Viral Ad Network to power it’s viral brand and user generated content charts. Each week the chart is updated with the latest and most shared Brand and UGC videos in the UK.

This week’s charts have been dominated by the upcoming football world cup in South Africa and Britain’s Got Talent on ITV1. At the top of the brand chart is Nike’s World Cup 2010 campaign including a bearded Wayne Rooney! Also making the cut, but not the final Brazil 23 man squad, is Ronaldinho. Watch the ad below:

Sitting at the top of the UGC chart is a remix of Eastender Phil Mitchell’s infamous punch. The scene where Phil Mitchell punches Ben is beautifully crafted to the backdrop of Lethal Bizzle’s “Pow! (Forward)”. Watch the video below:

Check out the NMA Viral Brand Chart here

Check out the NMA Viral UGC Chart here

The Viral Ad Network is recruiting a:

Publisher Recruitment Hero

You’ve spent some time studying and have become really good at / passionate about / engaged with a specialist skill. It might be that you’re:
- Highly numerate and analytical
- Great at selling stuff, love talking to people
- Methodical, organised, rigorous

How about getting paid to apply your skill(s) working for an interesting, creative, smart, well-run media company that will improve you as a professional without requiring you to wear a suit?

Tasks will be based around the following areas of responsibility:
- Researching and recruiting publishers and bloggers from key verticals to sign up to the Viral Ad Network
- Categorising publisher inventory to aid campaign planning and pitching processes
- Expanding VAN’s profile across key social media platforms – tweet, blog, get involved…
- Maintain and grow VAN’s publisher community.
- Ensuring VAN publisher inventory meets campaign targets

What you’re like
You’re probably not well-rounded (because it’s hard to be exceptional at everything). However, no matter how remarkable your talent, you will definitely need:
- A good degree. Everybody here has proven themselves academically or in the workplace. Being a graduate, you haven’t had a proper job yet so you’ll need the degree.
- A genuine desire to get stuck into the world of work, do something, make good stuff, take responsibility.
- A passion for all things digital and social. You should already be active on social media spaces, and writing a blog would be a bonus!
- An exceptional talent. We’ve got a great team in place but we’re always on the lookout for more match-winners.

Interested? Feel free to read more, but to apply mail Ally with a covering letter outlining why you think you are suitable for the position and where your strengths lie along with a 2 page CV.

Below is a little presentation we have put together to exemplify our prowess in the football sector and how we are able to take your footie related ads to a footie loving audience. Ahem, this happens to be a coincidence that we’re so close to the World Cup; a stroke of luck if you will…

Please take a look, and let me know if you have any questions:

If you are an advertiser you will probably have noticed that we completely re-built our campaign dashboards as part of our most recent updates.

As part of this push, we wanted an efficient way to insert basic Bullet charts into the dashboards.

These are simple charts to show how far a value has progressed towards it’s target as such [*]:

It sounds like a simple requirement, but there were many potential ways to generate them, and our dashboards have to be highly optimised to display quickly.

Implementation:

Here are the options I considered but ruled out:

• svg … but Internet Explorer doesn’t have support for svg.
• canvas (i.e. painting it client-side in javascript) … but Internet Explorer doesn’t have support for the canvas element.
• generate image server-side … requires an extra http request per chart, and delays load time.

This left me with two remaining options

• css / javascript / DOM manipulation …
• creating a flash / as3 movie …

I implemented both methods, but it very quickly became apparent that the javascript/css method was going to have more cross-browser issues than it was worth and be painful to test for bugs. We already require flash support on most dashboards, so I made a small flash movie.

Download (AS3 source, Binary .swf and example page):

BulletChart.swf comes in at around 1,300 bytes and should be cached by the user’s browser for further use – inserting the flashvars server-side allows you to cut down on http requests and compresses well if you have many charts on a page. It’s been thoroughly tested on Flash Player 10 and works on most versions of flash player 9.

viraladnetwork-bulletchart-1.0.tar.gz

License:

Our bulletchart is licensed under a BSD license, which allows you to use and modify it for commercial and non-commercial uses.

To Use:

Copy the .swf to your site and embed it as normal – you can use the following flashvars to configure the chart:

bartarget, barvalue, leftcolor, rightcolor, barcolor, targetcolor

To Compile from source (Linux/OSX/BSD):

Compilation requires the flex mxmlc compiler (which requires java). I believe this is the compiler used by flex builder etc, but windows users will have to play around.

It does not require the flash IDE.

# extract the archive
tar -xf viraladnetwork-bulletchart-1.0.tar.gz
# enter the new directory
cd bulletchart
# Modify the path to your flex compiler in the makefile
nano Makefile
# build the .swf
make

I hope people find this code useful while we’re waiting for the Internet Explorer team to release SVG support (SVG is expected in IE9 ).

Tim

[*] Most bullet charts show scale markers to display the current value on the chart itself, however we kept ours as clean as possible, and to leave the text in HTML for accessibility.

Our dev team will be rolling out some updates to our systems this afternoon.

This will mean you are unable to log in to your dashboard, but don’t worry – ads will keep running as normal throughout the update, and publishers will be paid as normal.

So last night I headed down to @Irisnation’s Borough Office for their #leadersdebate beer n’pizza meet-up.

It was awesome to meet-up with @AlbinoRiotMan (one of the brains behind the Lib Dem’s Labservative campaign) and a v.nice and clever guy from Albion who made the slap-tasic game Slap-o-meter

Check the live slapping during the debate below (apparently they got over 1 million slaps during the debate) and the Lib Dem’s genius Labservative campaign character mash-ups ; – )

UPDATE: #KittenCamp has been re-scheduled from Tuesday 27th April to a new date of Tuesday 11th May.  Apologies for any inconvenience for this change of date, but something bizarre happened to the venue at the weekend meaning that it’s been temporarily closed ; – (

Anyway get 6.30pm 11th of May in your diary for some wholesome #KittenCamp action, and we’ll see you then!

——————-

So we’re pleased to announce that #KittenCamp has found a new Soho home for our monthly meme meetups. And that home is Barrio Central – an uber-cool and new bar on Poland Street, conveniently (for us) located around the corner from our office.

The lovely people at Barrio have given us their indoor lounge garden area for the evening (complete with fake grass and flowers), so we can quite literally camp out and chat meme’s over the camp-fire.

We’ve also finalised the format for the evening:
- First up we’ll be doing a show and tell of the top 10 memes of the month (please share any ideas via #KittenCamp
- We’ll then doing some chatting and drinking – with (*some*) free beers provided
- And finally, we’ve got some live music going on from an unnamed (but no doubt v.cool) band to get toes tapping

#kittencamp = memes + music + beer

So come along + spread the good kitten word on ze Twitter. Thank you ; – )

Next Kitten camp (London) details:
Date: Tuesday 11th May
Time: 6.30 onwards
Twitter: #KittenCamp
Venue: Barrio Central, 6 Poland Street, Soho, London, W1F 8PS

Just wanted to point a bit of a nod towards our very own, brand spankingly new Viral brand chart:

http://www.nma.co.uk/resources/viral-brand-chart

We were assigned by the lovely people at New Media Age to help them report on the brand-funded virals that are taking the net by storm. The chart is updated weekly and features exclusively on the NMA site. It is also the first of its kind to report on UK specific trends, not that we’re ones to brag!

Our chart acknowledges important viral indicators on top of basic views. This includes activity in social areas like Facebook and Twitter to help understand the extent of a campaign’s effect on web communities. We aim to maintain this as a cutting edge indicator of what is trending online, as well as a useful tool for those interested in social media.

To accompany the branded chart and to make best use of the reporting system, we have also launched a weekly chart for user-generated content, to help understand current trends and favourites across the wider internet. If you’re a fan of acronymys and abbreviations, this could be classed as VAN’s chart on NMA to report on UK UCG on the interweb, OMG! See this here:

http://www.nma.co.uk/resources/viral-ugc-chart

Let us know if you would like any more info. Everyone else, please enjoy responsibly!