Viral Ad Network

Christmas is always a great time for retailers, and so it’s no surprise that we always see a boom in advertising spend in the final months of the year.

But increased ad spend means increased competition for ad space, both driving up prices, and allowing our ad targeting systems to make the most of publishers’ inventory.

As a result, the eCPM for many of our publishers has increased dramatically with demand recently.

In fact, the average publisher eCPM we’ve paid for UK viewers has almost tripled in the last two months. (you can see the shape of the curve in the chart below).

If you’re a Viral Ad Network publisher, the run up to Christmas is a good time to focus on your ad placement and make sure you’re making the most of the festive season.

The eCPM plotted above represents the (smoothed) weighted average eCPM paid out to publishers from the Viral Ad Network. The eCPM varies, and may go down as well as up. No guarantees of future prices are implied.

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.