• Serving of ads underwent 10 minutes of downtime for approximately half of all users.
• Tracking of actions underwent approximately 35 minutes of downtime.
• We will be bringing non-core functionality (such as dashboards) back online slowly during the next hour or so.

Tim Wintle

We will update this post with more information as we have it.

Update: 16:40 BST

All Ad serving systems are currently back to normal.

Dashboards are currently offline while we allow ad servers to catch up.

Final Update

As of 18:15 BST all dashboards and analytic tools have been brought back online

As a result, dashboards will be unavailable for a short period on this day.

As normal, all ad serving and tracking systems should remain operational during this upgrade, however you may notice an extended delay between actions occurring and them showing on your dashboards.

This issue has affected roughly 50% of publishers, and has meant that actions that occurred between the 9th and 13th of June may not have been recorded.

This situation has now been fixed, and we are in the process of adding the actions which were initially missed. Once these have been re-added, affected publishers should not see a loss of earnings due to this issue.

As part of this update, we will be taking all dashboards offline for most of Wednesday.

We plan to complete this update on Wednesday, and have dashboards back up by the end of the day.

Displays and Actions that have occurred during this time will still be recorded, however it may take a while before they begin to appear on dashboards. The dashboard numbers should have caught up by lunchtime on Thursday.

During this time, our Ad-operations team will not have significantly more information on displays or actions than are being displayed in dashboards – and we encourage all our clients and publishers to wait until Thursday morning before reporting any issues to the team.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s new – or read further for more information.

• A full list of all of your standard ad units
• Per-unit geolocation statistics
• Reserve prices / Backup ad serving

Full list of your Ad units.

Previously you could only access ad units that had seen traffic in the period you had selected. To make it easier for you to access your embed code, we’ve added an “Ad Units” option to your account navigation – which will let you access the settings for each of your standard units.

Note: Units created as part of a Fixed Price Offer will not show up on this page – please visit the offer page to access the embed code for these units.

Per-unit geolocation statistics

You’ve told us that you wanted to be able to see how much you are earning from international users for each of your ad units. We’ve now updated the ad unit statistics to show this breakdown over the previous 7 days. Publishers with different ad units on each of their sites will find this especially useful – as you can watch how the inventory on each site is performing.

Reserve Prices / Backup ad serving

As much as we try to make sure you are being paid a good price for every view, we often have territories (or types of viewers) that aren’t paying as much as a different ad provider might be.

To make sure you can make the most of your inventory, we now offer an option for you to set a reserve price on your unit, and provide the url of an alternative ad to show when we believe it would make you more money.

This is also a great way to market your own services – if you have a house ad advertising another part of your site, your own branded tshirts, dvds, or a monthly membership, you can tell us that you would like to show your own ad to viewers if we don’t have ads that will pay very much.

To set this up, create a blank page on your site that only contains your alternative ad (in the same size as your ad unit). Then go to your ad unit setup page, and enter the url of that page.

Now calculate the eCPM (effective cost per thousand displays) of your reserve ad in pence (world-wide), and enter that – we’ll start picking to either show our own ads, or to show your reserve ad depending on how much money we think you will earn.

These updates should not prevent ads from being displayed on publisher sites, or payments for those placements being recorded.

The publisher and advertiser dashboards, however, will go off-line for a brief period. We will also be pausing updates to the dashboards for a while – once the work is completed these will be resumed, and your dashboards should get back up to correct numbers within a few hours.

Again, this should not affect publisher income or advertiser placements during the day.
Tim Wintle

We have reverted this update, and we are currently re-processing statistics for the past 24 hours. All dashboard statistics should be back to normal by 9am GMT today (Tuesday 16th Nov 2010).

Tim Wintle

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.

You can now view your statistics for the past 7 days, for the past 14 days (the default), the past 30 days, or since your last payment.