Viral Ad Network

We have worked on many viral campaigns in the past, helping the creators of digital content get their viral videos and games amplified and seen by millions.

The proposition of the Viral Ad Network is a pretty simple one. We get your viral content, make it compatible with our network, then target it to the most relevant viewers in our audience for their enjoyment and consumption. We then pay our publishers for each time an engagement is made by a user on their site.

Below is a little tale of a campaign we worked on with our friends Cosmic Station & Associates to help launch the video assets that accompanied a wider PR campaign for the launch of the LG Crystal Mobile last year.

The presentation exemplifies how VAN works to launch, execute and report on your campaign and the type of results that can be achieved from a potent mix of good content and effective distribution.

Take a look, add a flake and pass around to your pals who have ace content. We’ll help give it an audience:

This blog post gives some quick tips and advice for SEO-newbies into how blogging can be used to optimise the SEO of your website, making sure it has the best chance to go viral!

Some SEO basics

• – Google loves content

• – Google loves relevant content

• – Google loves well-structured content

• – Google loves very focused content

• – Google loves content that is loved by other people (i.e. content that is linked to)

• – Google loves content that is loved by popular people

• – Google loves content that is connected to other popular people

What this means when you blog – 11 tips on optimising for SEO

• 1) Write content that is very focused and relevant.

• 2) Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title – always thinking “what terms / question / phrase would someone search for?”  For example, if you’re wanting to target keen bloggers, then they’re always interested in finding out “how to optimise the seo of my blog” – so give it as the title of your post!

• 3) Make sure that the link of the blog post (which is often auto-generated from the title of the blog post) contains the relevant search terms.

• 4) Make sure the opening paragraph repeats those key phrases – as the opening 30 or so words are the ones are judged as being particularly important.

• 5) Make sure you you link key words / phrases in your blog, to key pages in your site.  For example if you write “Viral seeding is an effective way to gain brand awareness“.  Link the words “Viral seeding” to the relevant page in your site you’re trying to optimise.

• 6) Keep repeating key phrases and terms throughout the blog post, and remember to do the relevant linking.  Don’t go over board though – as this may look like SPAM to Google’s bots.

• 7) Include other relevant content in your blog posting – so maybe include a relevant YouTube video, or post a relevant (and tagged) image.  This all adds to the richness and relevance of the blog.

• To show your blog post is connected and influential, drop is some links to other more influential sites.  e.g. You may link to the Brand Republic site, if you’re talking about advertising – to indicate that you’re connected to other sites.

• 9) Once you’ve written your blog, make sure it’s linked to by other sites.  N.B. the more influential the site linking to you, the better.  So for example, Digg the blog via Digg.com, or link to the blog from another blog – e.g. the Team Rubber blog.  To do this you might do a weekly blog round up of the best Team Rubber postings.  You should also obviously Tweet the post – to optimise the opportunity for the blog being picked up by others.

• 10) Finally – remember to write interestingly and well.  After all, much of the success of your blog post will be down to the how people enjoy and share your blog / content.  If people think it’s great, then they’ll do the link sharing for you!

• 11) Finally #2 – consider how someone might find your post out of context, and make sure it ends with the right kind of call to action – e.g. you might write an end line along the lines of “If you’re interested in this, then you may be interested in the Viral Ad Network, which provides great fun ads for the best blogs and sites.  Check it out our Viral Ad Network here!“

So what is “viral seeding”? To those in the industry it’s a very common term, but if you’re new to viral marketing, here’s a quick overview:

A piece of content is said to “go viral” if it is spread around by those who see it – via word of mouth, Facebook, email, twitter or any other method of communication. (Actually, I personally prefer to use a more mathematical definition, but I’ll leave that out for your sanity).

So the desired result is that someone (let’s call him Hector) gets sent your content from a friend (let’s call her Janice).

Since this is a first-hand recommendation – Hector’s far more likely to appreciate your content than someone who sees it in an ad placement on the side of a page (or “Sponsored Links” on a search page) – and far more likely to convert to a sale/lead.

But how did Janice get your content in the first place? Well, Janice may have been sent the content by another friend (we don’t really need a name for this one, but you can call him Laurence if you want) – but then we can ask the same question about how Laurence  got the content – giving us the social media equivalent of the chicken and the egg problem.

Clearly someone (Janice / Laurence / someone else) must have seen this through some other means – and that’s where viral seeding comes in.

Just as you plant a seed and watch it grow into a plant, with viral seeding you plant your content on the web and watch it grow into viral content.

Of course you can’t just drop a seed randomly and expect it to grow – you need to nurture it, make sure the soil is fertile, and bring nutrients and water to help it thrive. The same goes for seeding online content – you need to bring it viewers before it can start to thrive in the viral garden .

So how do viral seeding companies achieve that? We bring your content to viewers with placements on sites over the web – scattering it far and wide to fertile communities who are more likely to watch (and, in turn, share) your content. We upload videos to the top video sharing sites, flash games to the top game sites, and we provide bought online media placements – charging only when someone views your content, so it’s always in our interest to place your content where people will choose to watch it.

So if you’re sitting on a great viral asset, why not give us a call – or use our campaign estimator to see the kind of sites we can place your content on.

Just over a year ago, I ran some basic simulations of content “going viral” across various social graphs.

In particular, I tested two different parameters – how likely users are to send content to another person, and the ratio of  “undirected connections” to “directed connections” in the graph.

How likely users are to send content on is a simple property to imagine, but if connections are directed or not is a more abstract concept…

In essence, this ratio measured the question “if Alice could send a viral to Bob, could Bob send this viral to Alice”.

The two extremes I gave at the time were Facebook and Bloggers – Facebook is at the “undirected” end (and was even more so at the time) – if Alice is friends with Bob on facebook, then Bob is friends with Alice.

Blogs were on the other end – if Alice reads Bob’s blog, then there’s no reason to assume that Bob reads Alices blog.

The results of the simulation (run on a population the same size as the UK) looked like this (dark red means more people see the content)

Why does the ratio of undirected connections to directed connections matter so much? Well imagine Alice sends a great new ad to Bob – Bob now decides to send it to all his friends – but Alice has already seen it, so she’s not going to send it to anyone else.

Clearly the same thing happens with what’s know as “connectedness” – i.e. if Alice is connected to Bob, and Bob is connected to Charlie, what is the chance that Charlie is connected to Alice?

… which brings us nicely back to the Viral Ad Network

- by spreading content to a large number of (otherwise unconnected) websites through the Viral Ad Network, advertisers can reach largely unconnected groups of people, who can (in turn) spread the content to their friends – with less chance of those friends overlapping – reducing the chance they have already seen the content, and giving great content a chance to spread further.

With our sister company Rubber Republic, we’ve put together a handy article for UTalkMarketing: How to make a killer viral marketing video. 5 Top Tips for advertisers.

It’s a nice summary of what we’ve learned in the last ten or so years. Cheers – Andy

Rubber Republic’s creative director Matt just sent me this, it’s quick and interesting: 10 predictions for advertising in 2010 | Creativity_Unbound.

They’re only predictions, but these two chime nicely with VAN:

1. Consumers will play an even greater role as critics, commentators and content creators

5. Quality will be defined by instant, accessible, portable (less about polish, finish, and big production)

9. Creativity will matter more than ever (the opt in power of consumers will demand that when they do lean back even sales messages better be entertaining)

We massively advocate that the best ads are sharable and portable and entertaining. Good ads produce a viral effect – that’s the defining principle of the Viral Ad Network.

Consumers should also be able to comment, criticise and curate ads. Many brands and agencies will have a natural aversion to criticism. We understand this.

But every day we see more and more savvy brand managers and agencies encouraging comment and criticism. They know how to use it to engage with loyal customers and develop better products and services. That’s a clear win for consumers, and brands win when consumers win.

How to do this? In short: make great content, use social media platforms, and track what people think of ads. Who can do that? We can.

Opinions? Add your comments below…I love a good debate Or get in touch – we like to help and share.

Here at the Viral Ad Network, we’ve been trying to work out how we can get the biggest win for all our stakeholders. We’re extremely passionate about advertising and want to maximise the benefits for all involved:

• ~ We want our advertisers to get genuine engagement from a targeted, relevant audience;
• ~ We want this audience to enjoy the ads and choose to watch them;
• ~ We want our publishers to earn a fair price, and keep their sites’ popularity and appeal.

We think our cost-per-engagement (CPE) model is the most suitable method to reach the advertising parity that we strive for!

Our industry has been caught up a little in acronym tennis about the best expression for this model; we aren’t fussy about the exact term (we think CPE is ace!), as long as it means that people only pay when a user actively opts in and actually engages with the content.

CPE has obvious benefits to advertisers: they only pay for genuine interaction. People are becoming more and more used to online ads and cost per display advertising is subject to ‘Banner Blindness’ from many users. This makes a CPE ad spend more accountable as the advertiser won’t pay for people who aren’t interested in their message… But what are the benefits for everyone else?

The viewer gets a chance to decide if they want to engage with the content. Nothing is forced upon them, and as a result the ads have to be more entertaining and less of a hard sale.

As a publisher, your site’s viewers will get the choice whether they opt in to our ads. They can focus on the reason they are on your site: the content. With our ‘Fun Units’, we aim to add to the content of your site – to serve up fun and entertaining ads that will keep your site attractive to users so they will keep coming back. The virals we distribute are not a hard sell, so fit in with a wider range of sites, and aim to reward the viewer with fun and entertainment.

We also make our Fun Units show on-site games and videos; the video is played in-situ so when viewers engage with the content, they aren’t redirected away from your site. The fact that they are rewarding to your viewers also means you can approach the ad placement in your way… ‘video of the day’, ’sponsored fun’, whatever you think works best – as long as you say that it is an ad, we don’t mind!

Any questions, get in touch @ info(at)viraladnetwork(dot)net.

We love to hear what you think about the way we work!

One of the most common problems with Advertising for publishers (both on and off-line) is the worry of putting off your readers with ads that get in their way.

We think that viral ad network’s ads are truly different from other ad networks, as provided you (the publisher) with viral content that is actually interesting to your readers – content that they will enjoy interacting with.

It’s a bold claim, and one that we feel needs some backing up, so I thought I would share a screenshot I took a couple of minutes ago of our youtube viral channel.

Our Youtube channel shows some of the top viral ads that we have been distributing, largely across our publisher network, and as the screenshot shows, we’re consistently in the top 25 most watched channels in the UK, and one of the top channels in the world!

We hope that running ads like this will not only increase your revenue, but actually add value to your website for your users.

Welcome to the new viral ad network publisher blog. We intend to use this blog to keep our publishers updated on how our system works, and any optimisations you can perform to increase the number of users clicking on the ads you run on your site.

To get the blog started, I’m going to talk about:

The difference between ‘unique’ and ‘total’ clicks

Some of you may be asking what the difference is between these two numbers (and why we sometimes give you an offer for the total number of unique views, and sometimes for the total number of views).

For all of our campaigns, we are interested in real, natural clicks from website visitors. To this end, we do not count certain clicks – search engines crawling the web, and what look like spam crawlers for example.

We count a “view” as a real website viewer clicking on one of the links we have provided you with because they are interested in the content that you are linking to. For example one of the readers of your blog may want to enter a competition, or watch a video that you have recommended as being really funny. If that viewer likes the content enough they may come back to your site and click on the link again, which would count as another view (Hint – to make sure that the user finds your site again, you can use our simple social bookmarking toolbar). Each time that a real person clicks on the link to view the content, it counts as another “click”.

The number of “Unique Views”, on the other hand, is the number of people that click through to view the content. Although it only counts as one “unique view” if the person returns, if that person likes your page (and our content) so much that they email a link to your page to some of their friends then you could find that what starts as a single viewer can quickly lead to a whole bunch of “unique views” as their friends email links to their friends, and so on, This is what we call Going Viral.

Occasionally we may also say that we will pay you for “Actions”, which would be carefully specified in the offer that you recieve. For example, we may say that we will pay you for every person who likes a new mini-series so much that they sign up to be told about the newest videos, or for every person who enters a competition. Although you would be paid sugnificantly more for certain “Actions”, these users are harder to get, and how many of the people that click on the link end up signing up will depend on how enthusiastic your website has got them about the link – you may find that writing slightly more text about what is being offered may increase the number of people that complete the action, and your payments!

We’ll cover detailed strategies for getting more people excited about the content right here, so check back regularly.