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.

For anyone out there who has not yet heard of KittenCamp it’s probably not what you are thinking! It’s a monthly meet-up in London for web-loving ad industry type people to chat memes, drink beer and generally share some kitten goodness. Last week the Campers gathered at the Common Bar in Manchester’s Northern Quarter to watch Chris Quigley dress up as a giant cat (Jess out of Postman pat if anyone’s interested) and chat about some of the recent top memes.

Of course it wouldn’t be kitten camp without at least one kitten clip to supply the mandatory dose of cuteness so the show began with Slide Kitty, aaaahw!

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my favorite clips was the recent Youtube sensation Double Rainbow Guy, whose rather intense emotional reaction to a double rainbow has generated over 7 million views and counting, coining the phrase ‘what does it mean’ and sparking a series of copycat spoof videos and remixes like the Double Rainbow Song (hilariously now available to buy on iTunes)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the YouTube award winning Rainbow Guy Film Trailer

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course with all the recent world cup mania, love it or hate it the trumpeting racket/tune of the Vuvuzela became the unofficial soundtrack of the games. Kicking up a lot of noise with all the bloggers out there and generating a host of goodies on youtube like Gandalf Goes to the World Cup

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hitler and the Vuvuzela at the 2010 Fifa World Cup

Click here to view the embedded video.

and a new installment of the brilliant Will it Blend?

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the most popular brand virals of the year and top of our New Media Age Viral Chart for weeks was the Old Spice Man ad.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This genius  series of short youtube clips took the internet by storm providing a prime example of the power of Viral Seeding. The Old Spice creative team bombarded twitter, facebook and other social networking and blogging sites inviting the audience to ask questions of Mustafa’s character. They then made real time video responses to viewer’s comments posting them as replies online. This was a fantastic way to generate audience engagement and interaction with the ads, creating a story about the lead character that can continue indefinitely in future campaigns and giving everyone a chuckle along the way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally the last clip of the evening was Charlie the Unicorn 3, just because we start every Camp with a kitten and end with a unicorn, don’t ask me why that’s just how it goes. For a full list of all the clips visit the Rubber Republic blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After some more chats and drinks that were kindly sponsored by the Viral Ad Network we were joined by our guest speaker Victoria Stansfeld from Manchester City Football Club who lead the campers on a little journey through their online site and chatted about the social strategies of the football world.

Much merriment was had by all and many interesting things were learnt. Manky KittenCamp was a great success and we promise to be back some time soon!! We would like to say a big thank you to the tweet-loving @Rebeccawho who helped organise the event and the lovely people at the Common bar, thanks for spreading the kitten love!

P.S. you can now connect with KittenCamp on Facebook, come and join the party to hear updates on future events!

Here at VAN, we take LinkedIn very seriously (our “connections leader board” is testament to that!) However, despite being a very powerful social networking tool, it is often overlooked and under-utilised.

This interesting article on ProBlogger offers some useful tips that could be used by our publishers to help drive traffic to their blog from LinkedIn.

So if you haven’t already, check out LinkedIn, follow a few of the tips, and hopefully your blog traffic will increase!

PS – feel free to add me once you’ve signed up – I need to climb the VAN leaderboard!

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.

At yesterday’s VAN lunch the team discussed (in perhaps too much detail?) the merits of travelling unfeasible amounts of miles for the perfect lunchtime steak (including hiring stretch Hummers with on-board chefs). Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or perhaps it’s fate, but a link for Grillstock 2010 arrived in my inbox this morning.

Dubbed as “The UK’s first full-blown US-style barbecue competition & food show”, it’s taking place down at the harbourside in Bristol this weekend (17th & 18th July). To say I’m excited is an understatement

Just when you think Bristol can’t get any more culturally diverse or eclectic, they throw in the UK’s first chilli eating contest to keep you on your toes!

We love Bristol!

You can now follow the cyclists from Team HTC live on Google maps as they race through the different stages of the Tour.

Interesting to follow the whole team and see their tactics, or you can also click on a rider to see his speed, power, cadence and heart rate.

It would have been good to have kitted me out like that so everyone could see my progress on my recent cycle (London to Paris – nearly killed me! more here), although the speeds would not have been quite so impressive!

Check out the progress of Team HTC (HTC make the Google android phone btw) here

No matter how successful your blog, gaining more readers, comments and general interaction with your content is an important aim for most publishers. However, this is often more difficult than it sounds, whether you’re just starting out and trying to gain momentum, or are well established but your growth has ground to a halt.

Chris HELP!, the co-founder of HELP! Copy and Design, offers 5 reasons why your blog isn’t growing (guest article from bloggodown.com). These are applicable to publishers taking their first steps into the world of blogging, as well as those who are well established but their growth has plateaued.

1. You publish irregularly. I’m not saying that you have to publish new content every day. What I’m saying is that you need to pick a posting frequency and stick with it. Your readers need to know when to expect content from you, whether that’s 3 times a day or once a week. Haphazard posting just doesn’t work. It makes it impossible for your blog to gain any momentum, and it makes it difficult for readers to stick with you on a long-term basis.
2. You make it difficult to share your content. Your readers can be your most valuable tool for promoting your blog. If you make it easy for them to share your content through their favorite social media websites, they can tell all their friends and followers about your blog with just the click of a mouse. You need to have social media buttons on your blog that include instant sharing capabilities with Facebook, Twitter, Digg, ReddIt, and other popular sites. This can be very helpful in making your posts go viral.
3. You post “me too” content. There are hundreds of millions of blogs online. And no matter what niche you’re blogging in, you can bet you have some competition. Why should someone read your blog? What do you offer that can’t be found on the other blogs in your niche? These are the questions you need to ask yourself with every post you write. Don’t just rehash what everyone else is saying. “Me too” blogs have very limited growth potential. Be different. Be yourself.
4. You don’t write like you talk. Speaking of being yourself, your personality needs to shine through in your writing. Readers want to feel like they’re connecting with someone when they read your blog…like they know you. The best way to forge a connection with them is to write like you talk. Your blog posts will feel more conversational, and your blog will have a voice that’s completely different from all others in your niche.
5. Your blog isn’t optimized for the search engines. Every post you write should be optimized for maximum search engine visibility. This means using keyword-rich titles, tagging and categorizing your posts appropriately, and using keyword-rich anchor text to link to other content throughout your posts. This can help drive search engine traffic to your blog, allowing you to grow over time.

Hopefully these simple pointers can help some of our publishers improve their blogging behaviour, gain more readers, and therefore increase the traffic to their sites (and in turn, earn more revenue!)

The original article can be found at Blog Godown.

Big companies + fun = Awesome

Go try it now.

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.