Ads could either be inserted into a <div> (which used a blocking document.write call behind the scenes), or they could be inserted into an <iframe>. The majority of publishers only ever used the iframe method, but a few were provided with div insertion codes.

As our ad serving capabilities have advanced, we’ve created more and more formats which only work when inserted as an iframe (e.g. What we now call “Fun Units”).

At the same time, we have advanced our iframe insertion significantly:

• iframes are now loaded asynchronously on most web browsers – meaning your website loads much faster while our ads load in parallel.
• We’ve added lightbox ad formats, and extra library methods for ads which make our iframes super-powerful.

iframes brought many other improvements, such as fraud prevention and extra security for viewers from potential “malvertising” and “clickjacking” attacks.

We have now switched all ad unit embeds over to the iframe method.

You do not need to make any changes, and this should affect very few publishers.

However, if your current ad unit embed code contains a <script> tag pointing to this url:

http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame

Then you can now make your site a little bit faster for some users by changing that url to:

http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/

All new embed codes will reference this new url, and the probability that it will already be cached in your user’s browser (or by a proxy) is higher.

According to The Guardian, the UK based Daily Mail has overtaken the New York Times to the most viewed online newspaper position.

The Media Blog explains that this has largely been achieved by the Mail Online focusing on scantily-clad celebrities, female figures in Bikinis, and other titillating content. This makes it’s readership quite different from the “white, middle-aged, middle class of middle England who worry about a news agenda of wheelie bins, cancer, hoodies, liberals and multiculturalism” that the Daily Mail’s print version caters to (as the Media Blog describes the audience).

But how much of a good example does this set for publishers?

Yes, the Mail has increased it’s readership very significantly – but the question is what has that done to their bottom line?

Very few brands would choose to advertise next to this kind of risqué content – meaning less competition, and lower prices. For those who are advertising, user engagement rate is likely to be lower – leading to lower click through rates.

A quick search for “Mail Online Revenue” brought the results I was expecting. Paid Content reported in July that the revenue per user had almost halved over two years – despite readership having increased by 82% in a single year.

After the overheads for serving content to this many viewers is included, it would be interesting to see how much of this reduced revenue they managed to turn to profit. Finding that out by itself would be difficult.

The Mail Online’s parent group (Associated Newspaper’s) reported a loss of $1,407,127.19 on digital operations in the year ending October 2011, which their CEO put down to struggling to sell ad space in the US, as well as capital spent on growth of operations.

The Mail’s $1.4M loss is compared to the NYTimes’ performance in Q3 alone, who posted digital revenue of $50.3M, and total net income of $15.7M across the company ($20M up from the year before) – despite declining revenue from print.

Perhaps the Mail Online isn’t setting such a great example to other publishers after all…

This is part of internet-wide action against the bills coordinated for Jan 18th, and we are not being paid to run these ads.

For more information, visit americancensorship.org

Here’s a sample of a chart I’ve been looking at, showing how many ads we were displaying per second over the festive period – you can ignore the different colours, they represent which datacentre ads were being displayed from.

It was the night before Christmas…

And all through the house not a key was pressed, nor even a mouse [button].

Yup – Christmas Eve saw the majority of web traffic drop off far earlier than the rest of the year, as people got a good night’s sleep ready for the big day. (And countries who have their main celebration on Christmas Eve settled down after a long day). Traffic during the night (at local times) was approximately 30% lower than normal.

Christmas Day

I for one was too busy putting the turkey in the oven and peeling veg to be surfing the net at the start of Christmas day – and with kids distracted by stockings and new toys, internet usage seems to have been focused in a much narrower period in the middle of the day.

This is different from the behaviour we used to see a few years ago, when there would be a large surge of traffic in the afternoon as people brought their new internet devices online. Perhaps the market in the countries we are focusing on is saturated enough that Christmas no longer brings so many new internet users.

Boxing day relaxation

Boxing day was the first day I had time to go online to catch up on emails etc – and it seems I was not alone. From early afternoon people came online in their masses – and many stayed there late into the night – making this boxing day come very close to being a record-breaking day for the Viral Ad Network – we served only 350K less ads on this Boxing day than on our highest day ever.

What did you do?

What was your internet usage like over Christmas? Did you spend Boxing day shopping online, talking to friends, or reading news sites? I’m interested in hearing – leave a comment below.

This is an extremely important part of VAN that looks after our bloggers and website owners; providing them with great ad campaigns that pay them well, and ultimately providing our advertisers with views for their campaigns on awesome sites.

So what’s the job like:

This is a great way to get started in the industry. You get to work on great campaigns for big clients, and you’ll pick up key skills in account management, planning, media buying and reporting. We hope you’ll stick around for a couple of years, but we’ll train you in ways that give you a great preparation to step up to your next position (whether it’s internal or external).

The role has three key responsibilities:

• • Help build our network of quality online publishers
  • Support the campaign management team with delivery of clients campaigns
  • Support the sales team with publisher input for pitching

In detail…

• • Researching and recruiting publishers and bloggers from desired categories to sign up to the network
  • Assessing and processing incoming publisher signups.
  • Categorising publisher inventory to aid campaign planning and pitching
  • Expanding VAN’s profile across key social media platforms – tweet, blog, get involved…
  • Help to grow VAN’s publisher community with relevant marketing & events.
  • Ensure VAN publisher inventory meets individual campaign targets.

What you’re like:

This is a job for people who:

• • Are comfortable with numbers, especially straightforward arithmetic.
  • Enjoy talking to people by phone and email to develop relationships.
  • Work hard (cliche, but true here). It’s a job where you need to get your tasks done to time. It can also be necessary to check campaign progress out of office hours (using online systems).
  • Have solid writing skills: we don’t have time to check your spelling etc, and we’re working with publishers who may judge us negatively if you can’t write clearly and accurately.

The type of work is fairly consistent and suits someone who is happy to do similar tasks on a daily basis. That said, the job is exciting: new opportunities come up, new relationships will be formed, we get sales wins and awesome content to seed, and campaigns need to get their views.

You will definitely need:

• • A genuine desire to get stuck into work and take responsibility.
  • A passion for online publishing. You need to be an active consumer of digital, and experience writing or running a blog would be great.
  • Previous work experience, this can be anything dealing with people or a task based role. It doesn’t have to be relevant to marketing or online, but we don’t have time to teach you the most basic professional and get-things-done skills.

Salary and progression

• • Within the role, you can progress from ‘novice’ to ‘ninja’. This would take a couple of years. A complete novice starts on £14.4k, and a ninja would get around £25k.
  • There’s healthy profit share on top for all staff (linked to company performance), and a success club (team rewards for making monthly sales target).
  • There’s a wide range of progression opportunities when it’s time to move on from this role. There may be opportunities to move up within VAN taking management responsibility for aspects of sales or operations, or moving elsewhere within the Team Rubber group. It’s also a great stepping stone into agencies or client-side marketing, giving a solid grounding in account management, media planning and buying, and campaign operations.

Interested? To apply mail ally@viraladnetwork.net 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.

The concept isn’t exactly a ‘new’ one, YouTube has been gathering user data for quite a while now and anyone familiar with YouTube Insights will probably recognise a lot of the information in these reports, but there are a couple of handy improvements worth a mention.

So what’s new?

The first things you’ll notice are the cosmetic changes, a more intuitive layout, nice simple colour scheme, new buttons and titles for reports. But YouTube Analytics is more than just a prettier version of insights. The new overview gives an instant summary of your overall channel performance and engagement, with easy access to detailed information about individual videos that offers a more precise understanding of your audience. The data filter allows you to break down reports by content, geography, and date. Also you can now discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions, allowing you to focus your marketing on the most popular types of content.

The YouTube Analytics Overview breaks down the full details of all the options available but I’ve outlined some of my favorite features below.

Audience Retention: Formerly called Hot Spots, this report shows how far viewers watch through your video, really useful stuff if you want to understand how engaged people really are.

It measures the number of views for every moment of the video, so you can see where people have skipped forward, replayed a section or switched off. (Pay close attention to the first 15 seconds of every clip as according to YouTube that’s when your viewers are most likely to drop-off.)

YouTube even allow you to play back your video in the report to see exactly how it corresponds to the peaks and valleys of the graph. It’s a great way to work out the parts of your video that work best and identify any points where people start to get bored – that way you can focus on making the kind of content that your audience appears to enjoy.

Estimated earnings: This is useful if you’re interested in making money from your YouTube channel. You can see your total estimated earnings from the net revenue from Google-sold advertising, the estimated earnings from auction sold advertising via AdSense for Video and the estimated earnings from Doubleclick advertising and any other YouTube-sold sources.

Playback Location / Traffic Sources Report: Formally called Discovery, this report helps distinguish between how viewers found a video, i.e. through a YouTube search, Twitter link etc and where a video is being watched. It’s quite useful if you’re embedding your video on sites other than YouTube.

Why is it important to measure video performance?

If you are serious about using YouTube as a marketing tool it’s essential to set some goals, do you want it to drive traffic to your website? Generate ad revenue? Raise brand awareness? Whatever your targets are, the reporting data from analytics will help you to develop a deeper understanding of your audience and strategies and make well informed decisions when creating new content.

So if you’ve never explored the monitoring stats behind your content then this is the time to start!

One of the most common arguments justifying using tags carrying semantic value (such as <header>, <article>, etc) precisely is that it makes it easier for search engines to index your site…

But i’ve never heard someone who has written an indexer focus on that argument.

(note I’m not saying there isn’t a very minor effect… but certainly not a massive change)

When an indexer is trying to pick out the important text on a page, it has two main problems:

1. Removing all the unimportant text (headers, navigation, footers etc)
2. Dealing with spammers

The problem is that any technique websites can use to give hints to indexers will immediately be abused by spammers.

Take the keywords meta tag. Back in 1995, search engines thought it would be great if websites could add some semantic data to their sites, and they invented the “keywords” meta tag – which let websites specify keywords describing their site.

That failed badly – for every site which used the tag to add useful keywords, several spam sites used the keywords to add irrelevant keywords to their site. At the time it wasn’t unusual to skip through several pages of search results before finding a site which wasn’t spam. By 1998, search engines had started ignoring the tag.

As a result of spammers, it’s fairly much a given that all indexed data about the page has to come from what the user can see on the page – not from hidden markup features.

CSS lets us style elements in any way we like – we can effectively change the visual meaning of any two tags however we see fit.

It would be trivial for example to switch <h1> and <small> tags by modifying the styles for the elements. On a normal website you may never want to do that, but now consider you’re a spammer – you can put two different sets of copy on the page, and the raw markup can focus on one set of copy while your CSS focuses the user on completely different copy.

If an indexer was to base their importance largely on which tags were being used (e.g. rank <h1> tags highly) then they would be wide open to spam from that page.

It is possible for indexers to take hints from these tags, and use them if they match with their own results for detecting sections of a page, but they certainly can’t take them at face value.

We’ve now set our crawler live across all publisher sites, so it’s time for a formal introduction.

What is VANCrawler?

VANCrawler is a web crawler which downloads a copy of all pages showing our ad units onto our own servers, where we apply our own natural language processing for advanced contextual targeting, scan pages for potential issues, and run countless other processing to help us target ads better.

What Do I need to do?

We have spotted several sites which have issues with the text encoding used on their pages. We suggest that all publishers double-check that they are declaring the correct encoding (“charset”) for their site.

Without this information, crawlers don’t know how to treat words containing accented letters such as “publicité”, or non-latin letters such as “Διαδίκτυο” or “網站”. If you’re not using these letters you may still be affected, as without the correct character set we may believe you are.

This is a problem for crawlers which index pages for search engines, and for users around the world as well as our own crawler, so fixing this issue on sites where it occurs may increase your search engine traffic as well.

You can specify the character encoding for your website in the Content-Type HTTP header, in the XML declaration for XHTML, or using a special tag for HTML. Please ensure that this matches the character encoding which your documents use when they are served.

If you are uncertain which encoding you are using, you can generally find the “charset” specified somewhere in your web browser (e.g. under “View>Character Encoding” in Firefox. For European users using windows, this will probably be “Windows-1252″. For Users on any other operating system (or for advanced websites on Windows), it will probably be “UTF-8″.

We have also noticed several sites serving pages which are not encoded using a valid encoding at all.

This may occur from using a server-side language such as PHP to concatenate strings which use different encodings. For example a string stored in a database may be encoded using UCS-4 (where each letter is represented as 4-bytes), and may then be concatenated with an ascii string (where each letter is one byte). This situation is even more difficult for crawlers to deal with, and so we suggest that publishers who program their own server-side pages check that they are not mixing different character sets when generating their pages.

Can I prevent VANCrawler from accessing my site?

VANCrawler follows the robots.txt standard, and will follow rules for User-Agent: VANCrawler..

If you want to limit how often we crawl pages on your site, you can use the crawl-delay robots.txt option to specify the minimum number of seconds we should wait between crawls.

As VANCrawler is being used to target ads to increase your revenue, we recommend you do not disallow access to pages on your site, however you may enter urls to exclude in the robots.txt format.

You can find more information on our ad crawler here: http://www.viraladnetwork.net/crawler-info

The Mongol Rally is an epic 10,000 mile charity road-trip from London to Mongolia across three deserts, five mountain ranges and seemingly endless stretches of remote barren land. It’s been described by some as “the greatest adventure possible”, but as one of the least populated countries in the world and with no support crew, help lines or road signs and sometimes days of traveling without seeing another living soul, the reality of life on the road can be hard.

This is definitely not a holiday but for those with the perseverance, ingenuity and sheer good luck to make it across a third of the world’s most inhospitable terrain and over that finish line the thrill must be pretty epic!

Tempted? There are still places available in the 2012 race, check the website to find out more.

Directski.com: I’m sure we would all agree that some healthy competition keeps everyone on their toes and a bit of friendly banter between rival companies never really does any harm. Well, online ski holiday provider Directski.com are certainly testing that theory by releasing this amusing video ad in response to an alleged disagreement with their competitor, Crystal Ski, over price comparisons.

With the title ‘Crystal Ski were so annoyed about our low prices they phoned our dad’, the video shows the two owners of the company, their dad and a rather intimidating Frank Bruno, challenging their competitors to a fight to prove whose dad is hardest.

Our dad vs their dad… We know who’s cheaper… Now let’s see who’s harder.’

Now we’re waiting to see if Crystal Ski make a response video!

Here’s to Real Friends extended trailer: Scotch whisky brand, Chivas Regal have ventured into the film industry, going beyond product placement to produce movies in the hopes of reaching a more receptive mass market. They worked with Euro RSCG to commission two short films by Academy Award winning short filmmaker Joachim Back.

The films are intended to increase awareness of their brands ‘social chivalry’ with two stories about the highs and lows of modern male friendships. We’ve been seeding the  extended teaser trailer but both films; Here’s to Big Bear and Here’s to Twinkle are available to watch now, perfect for a little afternoon break!

El Espectáculo de Sombras Chinescas Más Impresionante del Mundo

The world’s largest shadow puppet show – filmed at a live football match in Valencia.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video is part of a Europe-wide integrated campaign that we’re seeding for the agency JWT to advertise Trident Gum. How does a video of giant shadow puppet chickens playing football advertise chewing gum? I hear you ask… Well the clip is just one of a whole bizarre series from The Pointless Collective, designed to spread the word that ‘chewing Trident Senses Gum is pointless yet fun’.

The campaign features a collection of films, events, quirky artwork and funny stories that follow the adventures of three masked super heroes as they come up with elaborate ways to bring pointless fun to the world. Check out their website and Facebook page if you want to read more about their various crazy escapades.

Diversity | Street Dance For Change

Now, any Britain’s Got Talent fans out there will remember the 2009 wining dance group, Diversity. Well they’ve teamed up with insurance firm Aviva to make the Street Dance For Change video as part of the Street to School programme, committed to raising awareness of the 100,000 young people who run away every year in the UK.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through the initiative, Aviva are supporting street children projects in the UK and around the world, with the aim of helping half a million street children get back in to education or training by 2015. In the UK, their charity partner Railway Children is dedicated to supporting vulnerable children living alone on the streets, where they suffer abuse and exploitation.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a ‘Mover-groover’ why not have a go and upload your own 30 second dance video, not only will Aviva donate £2 to the charity every time the video is watched but you might also be in for a chance to win tickets to Diversity’s 2012 tour and meet Diversity themselves!!

Check out the official Facebook page for more information on how you can get involved and watch some of the best uploaded dance clips.