Viral Ad Network

Over the past few years, the size of websites has increased dramatically – driven partly by advertiser demand for shinier creatives, partly by a new generation of web designers who have never focused on file size, and partly by increased broadband penetration.

File size is very important.There used to be a rule of thumb that if your website didn’t load within three seconds then the user would probably leave your website – and I believe that rule still holds. For publishers, that means you are losing out on ad revenue (and visitors) by serving large file sizes.

Even if a viewer does stay on the website, a slow page can irritate the user – which can impact negatively on the brand who’s adverts are being shown.

Not only that, but many people pay for data by the Mb / Gb (especially mobile users) – sending your users larger data than they need costs them real money, and puts them off websites and advertisers.

File size is being overlooked though. If you’re from an ad agency or  a publisher, you are probably willing (and able) to pay for high-speed internet access. Website viewers, the people being advertised to, aren’t always in the same situation though.

As an example, I just opened up the website of a popular web publisher, and noticed the page (including ads) was over 8mb in size.

Here’s how long that website would take to load on a user’s computer, depending on what internet connection the user is on:

1. 8 seconds (10Mbps broadband – you’re probably on this)
2. 45 seconds (2Mbps broadband – most of your users are probably on approximately this speed)
3. 3 minutes 7 seconds (500Kbps broadband – quite a few of your users are probably on this)
4. 40 minutes (56Kbps modem – you’d be surprised how many are still on this)

Of course, people don’t just browse from their homes and offices – users browse from mobile phones and from mobile broadband.

Although mobile broadband can have very fast speeds (8Mbps), this speed goes down very fast if you’re on the move. Travelling on the train this weekend, I recorded my average broadband speed at about 120Kbps. For the page above, it takes about 20 minutes to load the page.

Here in the UK, up to 50% of users have mobile broadband – which means that 50% of viewers to this site  may be have to wait 20 minutes for a page before your ads load.

The situation gets worse in other countries. For example, in Australia the average speed is far lower. If you’re serving ads world-wide, you should be aware that they’re probably taking far longer to load in Australia than they are to users in the USA or UK.

So that’s the bad news about the industry in general, but here’s what we at the Viral Ad Network are doing about the issue:

How the Viral Ad Network reduces Ad size:

For all ads, we are able to do the following

1. We serve the majority of data through compressed protocols (See RFC 2616 – section 3.5)
2. All of our standard javascripts are made as compact as possible, using the most advanced javascript analysis tools available.
3. We only load our standard code when it’s required.
4. We split our ad serving into two parts – the part that’s the same for every ad, and the part that varies depending on which ad is being served. We tell browsers and proxies cache the former as much as possible (including across different websites), and only load the latter each time an ad is displayed.
5. Most Ethernet implementations have a MTU of approximately 1492 bytes. We endeavour to fit our initial ad code into a single TCP packet (we currently serve roughly 870 bytes of initial javascript).

In addition, for ad creatives which we have control over, we do the following:

1. For data feeds loaded from servers, we provide server-side rewriting that compacts the data as much as possible (and compresses it).
2. For images, we re-compress the images to reduce file size (Note re-compression is also a necessary precaution for security)
3. For video players we produce ourselves, we sometimes in-line any images into the swf. This reduces the number of requests that have to be made for the data.
4. We try to post-load data from the server whenever possible. This means the code required by the ad often doesn’t load until after the website and ads have loaded, and the user starts interacting with an ad.

We pushed a bunch of new features out yesterday, including:

1. More compact, faster, ads (file size for all our ads has been reduced noticeably, which should make them display faster on publisher sites)
2. Language specific targeting. Previously, users have seen ads based purely on their location. Now, ads may be targeted based on the user’s preferred language. For example, a French language ad may now be targeted at French speakers in Canada, in addition to users located in France.
3. Extra precision for targeting options – from now, certain ads may only target individual Operating Systems and devices, while this feature is in test, this may include users across 20 different operating systems.

In my last post, I wrote about how our Ad Network works to ensure that supply of ad viewers, and the demand for them, balance out to ensure publishers get paid the right about for the value they bring to advertisers.

You may be wondering what the direct effects of that are for you as a website publisher; Well I’m going to let you in on the secret to making money from advertising that magazine publishers have known about for years, so read on…

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When I first started dabbling in internet advertising (as a publisher, circa 1997), per-impression advertising was the norm. All displays were measured in CPM (Cost Per Mille – the price per 1,000 displays).

There was, however, some very flawed reasoning behind the assumption that that was a reasonable thing to pay by – for an advertiser, the concept of display CPM assumes that every thousand displays of an ad will bring you the same income.

Of course this is not true – showing an ad to 1,000 teenagers will get you a different response from showing your ad to 1,000 parents for example (which of those is better depends on what you are selling).

Less obvious differences exist as well – people are more likely to splurge on large items just after pay-day than half way through the month, and they are more likely to take anti-drinking advertisements seriously on a sunday morning.

Looking beyond the users that view the ads, the internet has changed a lot since the ninties. XHR became widespread at the change of the millenium, allowing “AJAX” websites where the browser doesn’t have to load a new page every time the user did something. Suddenly an entire visit to a website could be done on a single page, and the meaning of “display” got more blurred.

The Viral Ad Network works on a different level – publishers are paid (and advertisers pay) for some kind of interaction with the ad – which may be a video starting playing, a video ending, a clickthrough to a different site, a player reaching the second level in a game, or just about anything. This metric is more closely linked to the value a publisher brings to the advertiser – but there are still variations in how much each viewer is worth to the advertiser.

These differences are carried through in the price that’s actually paid for a viewer – and these prices vary with supply and demand.

Essentially, the more demand advertisers have for viewers on specific sites / from specific countries, the higher the price per viewer will be. Likewise, the more supply there is of similar sites, the lower the price per viewer will be.

The job of our syndication system is to create a market where these prices change efficiently with supply and demand – so publishers get paid as much as they should be, and so advertisers aren’t paying more than they should. We spend a lot of time doing mathematical modeling of how our software works to ensure it fills this role correctly, and we’re proud of the level to which it works.

I’m pleased to announce our newest round of updates to the Viral Ad Network:

Ad Targeting

After the success of our previous updates to our ad targeting,  we’re now analysing an extra layer of data in the same manner to target ads better, and increase click-through rates.

Ads targeting specific countries or niches will now be compared with the performance of other ads in those specific target audiences, helping to make the most out of every viewer our publishers get.

Publisher Dashboards

By default, your dashboards will now show you your total earnings in the past 14 days. This makes it easier to glance at your dashboard and immediately estimate your current daily earnings from your site.

To show all earnings since your last payment (the previous setting)  simply select “Since Last Payment” in the Date Range dropdown.

Publisher Offers

We’ve streamlined our system for offering specific ads to publishers. This means that in some situations you may now start to receive automated emails letting you know when there is a new offer – and letting you know when the offer ends.

In addition – some publishers will now be given the option of running offers alongside other ads, all without having to modify the embed code on your site. This means that you can make the most of the efficiency of our automated targeting system while running offers outside of our standard syndicated units.

Tim Wintle

Choosing which ads to show can be difficult if there are multiple offers on the table – and it’s easy to get blinded by the price per action (the most obviously financial number that’s normally available).

Our syndicated ad auction uses advertisers’ targeting preferences to increase the expected publisher income directly – a technique that doesn’t involve increased costs per action.

A simple example

You have the option to put one of two different ads up on your site. You can either put up our syndicated unit, which will try to choose the best ads available to show to a user. From looking at your account, you know that you’ve been paid an average of 3.3 pence per viewer.

You have another offer as well – as an advertiser has offered you 5 pence per action to show their ad – which is targeting viewers in the UK.

Which ad should you put up? At a quick glance it might seem obvious that you want to put up the 5 pence offer – but remember that the 5 pence offer is only targeting viewers in the UK. Looking at the country information in your viraladnetwork.net dashboard, you can see that you get a third of your users from the UK, a third from Germany, and a third from France.

So which should you choose? Let’s have a look:

Placing the “5 pence” UK only offer:

Let’s look at the profit you’ll make from three viewers coming – one from France, one from Germany, and one from the UK.

You’ll get paid 5 pence for the UK viewer, but nothing for the other two.

As you can see – the total income you get from these three viewers will be 5 pence. That’s an average of about 1.7 pence per action, or 5 pence per paid action (be sure you know which one the advertiser is reporting – if the advertiser’s offer has been made through the Viral Ad Network, you can see the total number of actions (including non-paid) on your main dashboard page, and you can see the total number of paid actions on the “offers” page).

Placing a syndicated unit:

Let’s look at the profit you’ll make from the same three viewers coming when you have a syndicated unit up…

This time you’re paid for all three viewers (if you want to estimate how much you are paid for visitors on a per-country basis based on previous numbers, you can check on your Viral Ad Network dashboard).

As you can see – the total income you get from these three viewers will be 10 pence – twice as much as for the “5 pence” offer. That’s an average of 3.3 pence per action (price per action is now the same as price per paid action).

How can I estimate this for myself?

It’s worth considering these kind of calculations when you place any content on your site – and recent geo-location information is readily available for you to view on your dashboard once you’ve placed any of our content. The average prices paid will vary with demand though – so keep an eye on your most recent numbers to see what’s on offer.

Of course, we target on much more than the country users come from – and we’re constantly improving our targeting systems – so it’s also worth considering the average clickthrough rate as well – but I’ll save that for another time.

As those of you hosting syndicated Fun Units will know, your units now have their very own geo-targeting mechanism implemented to ensure that our content is shown to the right audience, and to display relevant fun stuff to the visitors of your site.

We realised that this was never announced as loudly as it should have been. Hopefully this should clarify things in enough detail and act as a reference point for you guys until it’s articulated better on the main site:

Geo-targeting allows us to continue to pay you for every view that comes to your site and clicks on our viral content. For example, if somebody from an Italian IP address visits your page, your Fun Unit will automatically display the most relevant content that we are serving for Italian users.

Many advertisers only want to pay for viewers from specific countries. By showing different ads to different users, we are able show each user the ads that will pay you the most. If we have nothing targeted at that specific country, we will show the next highest ad that is available world-wide. This ensures that you receive a payment for every click delivered through your Fun Unit, that the amount you get paid is optimised, and that your inventory isn’t going to waste.

Ker-ching!

Our main targets, based on advertiser trends from the last few months, are the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. This is where we are highly likely to be serving ads at any time, so publishers with significant traffic in any of these territories will currently benefit the most from hosting a Fun Unit. But rest assured, we’re constantly looking to expand these territories and provide those of you with valuable traffic elsewhere with a unit of your own soon!

We will also continue to offer managed placements as they come in for a set time periods and targets – and for a specified price for each territory. The same principles as above will apply, but the content isn’t syndicated and rotated.

Alternatively, if you have an Ad Unit on your site, we often specifically target certain campaigns directly into units. These placements will only be shown to users when our system feels that your site will earn more by showing this site-targetted ad than by showing one that is showing across the rest of the network.

We hope this is clear. Email us at publishers@viraladnetwork.net if you need any more specific details. Also, feel free to post any feedback to us that you may have, we always want to know what we can do better, and look into giving you the things that are going to make your life easier.

Cheers,

The Viral Ad Network team.

A very Happy New Year to all our publishers! December was an incredibly hectic month for us as advertisers squeezed out the last remnants of end of year budgets and launched sales driving campaigns for Christmas. In total we were running over 30 campaigns before the start of the New Year!

Of course in 2009 advertisers are going to be more meticulous than ever in assessing the performance of their budgets and efficacy of their campaigns… but this will mean we will be very well placed to attract more advertisers as our medium and content provides exactly those reporting tools and fastidiousness of targeting that advertisers desire. The upswing at the end of 2008 demonstrated just that and we have already been privy to forecasts and projections that suggest our client base will continue to grow throughout 2009.

Which means, of course, that we are on the look-out for more quality publishers. We have found that referrals from our current publishers have worked brilliantly and we would be delighted to know of any sites you would suggest.

Similarly we are finding that our new syndicated content units are performing very well for those publishers who have taken them up, taking time-consuming administrative tasks away and allowing greater flexibility of attractive content. We are always happy to work something bespoke out for your site so do let us know if you want to give them a try!

One large part of a website that many publishers miss out on monetising is their error pages.

By far the most common one is the 404 “file not found” error message, which can get shown for many different reasons – removing pages from your site, or making a typo in a link for example.

Most webmasters leave these pages with their default settings, but you can actually customise them as much as you want (there are several amusing examples).

The easiest way to make extra money off this extra traffic is to place one of our content units into the page – that way you don't have to manage updating the ads that are getting shown, and you can focus attention direct onto an advertising placement.

Here is an example 404 page we've put together with one of our gadget content units in the centre of the page (Gadget content units are still in beta)

If you have our content units in your site already, then we suggest that you request a new content unit from your contact at the viral ad network, so that you can see your 404 page income separately.

How to customise your error pages:

If you're using wordpress, this page is part of your theme folder, and you can edit it in the same way you would edit another page, including using a wordpress widget to insert the unit if that is your preferred method.

If you're using Apache, or a different system behind the Apache web server, then you would create a html page somewhere on your server, and add the following line to your configuration files (either .htaccess, httpd.conf or apache.conf depending on how your server is set up):

ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/your/error-document.html

(change “/path/to/your/error-document.html” to the path to your new html file)

Tim Wintle

We’re proud to announce the launch of our new style of publisher content unit.

We’ve been running our first styles of content unit in invitation-only beta for a little while but until now the ads that have been shown have been limited to text or image links to our content.

With the launch of our gadget content units we can now offer you the chance to embed the entertaining, viral content you’ve come to expect from us directly into your site…and get paid for it.  And you get all the simplicity of our syndication system to boot.

What is a Gadget Content Unit?

A gadget unit can display any type of rich-media content securely in your website automatically. This content can include games, videos or any other rich-media.

Here’s an example gadget content unit:

How do I place a Content Unit?

It’s really easy to place a content unit on your page.  We’ll provide you with a custom embed code which you’ll just need to include in the relevant place on your page.  Then, our syndication system does the rest.  Your embed code will look something like the example below (please don’t copy and paste this example, though — we’ll provide you with your own code if you want a gadget ad!):

<mce:script type="text/javascript"><!-- var vaunit_unit_type=0; var vaunit_width=300; var vaunit_height=250; var vaunit_id=32; // --></mce:script><br /> <mce:script type="text/javascript" src="http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame" mce_src="http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame" ></mce:script>