Viral Ad Network

Are you struggling to keep up with all the latest web trends in social media? Fear not, sign up to Google Xistence and it will live your life for you. They’ll even email you weekly updates to inform you what’s happening in your real life!

Now this may not be an online advert or any sort of digital innovation, but sometimes print ads can still put a smile on my face.

Great work for Nescafé by McCann Erickson

(via Curved White)

So we’ve been seeding viral videos and content for over 4 years or so now, and in that time things have definitely changed in the world of viral seeding.  The two biggest changes in the world of viral seeding are:
1) Internet noise: there’s now a whole lot more videos being created and shared across the internet – mainly due to the YouTube phenomenon – so it’s getting more and more difficult to get your content (however good it is) seen by the right people.
2) The market size: the internet’s now matured, and “sharing virals” is now part of everyday behaviour.  This means the opportunities are greater – but as I mentioned in my previous point, the chances of maximising those opportunities is more difficult.

Thats’ where we come in!  We’ve built the Viral Ad Network (VAN) over the last 5 years to allow agencies and brands to make sure they get their viral campaigns seen by the right people.  We do this through a network of 100’s of blogs / site partners – which mean we can (at the click of a button) get your viral campaign seeded and seen by millions!

Genius.  If you’ve got a viral campaign to seed, then drop us a note.  We run viral seeding campaigns in the UK, Europe and US, and you can very quickly plan your campaign using our Viral seeding planning tool – check it here!

Or alternatively, drop us a mail: info@viraladnetwork.net or call us 00 44 845 680 1220

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.

Following on from my previous post on how your profile can be used as a marketing tool, I have recently encountered an interesting use of this…

http://oneideaaday.tumblr.com/

A job-hunting junior strategic planner will be posting an ‘idea a day’ on his tumblr until someone hires him. This is a great example of someone marketing themselves as a brand. It shows that he gets social media (each idea is under 140 characters so can be tweeted) and the ideas vary between medium so potentially appeal to lots of different branches of advertising.

I am looking forward to following his plight. It will be interesting to see if his ideas stay at a similar standard, get worse if he loses his inspiration for the project, or if they get better as he gets feedback and finds a more efficient creative route!

Good luck Nathanael!

(thanks to Indi.Ca on Flikr for the photo)

It’s surprising how little things can make a difference to the amount of visitors who choose to engage with the ads on your site – and hence make a difference to how much money you earn from your website.

If you haven’t experimented with moving your ads around to increase your earnings then try making an extra new-year’s resolution to run some tests and see how you do – it doesn’t need to be complicated, something as simple as switching ads from the left…

to the right…

(or v.v.) can have an effect – so go on, play around with your placements and see how much you can increase your income this year.

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

Choosing which ads to show can be difficult if there are multiple offers on the table – and it’s easy to get blinded by the price per action (the most obviously financial number that’s normally available).

Our syndicated ad auction uses advertisers’ targeting preferences to increase the expected publisher income directly – a technique that doesn’t involve increased costs per action.

A simple example

You have the option to put one of two different ads up on your site. You can either put up our syndicated unit, which will try to choose the best ads available to show to a user. From looking at your account, you know that you’ve been paid an average of 3.3 pence per viewer.

You have another offer as well – as an advertiser has offered you 5 pence per action to show their ad – which is targeting viewers in the UK.

Which ad should you put up? At a quick glance it might seem obvious that you want to put up the 5 pence offer – but remember that the 5 pence offer is only targeting viewers in the UK. Looking at the country information in your viraladnetwork.net dashboard, you can see that you get a third of your users from the UK, a third from Germany, and a third from France.

So which should you choose? Let’s have a look:

Placing the “5 pence” UK only offer:

Let’s look at the profit you’ll make from three viewers coming – one from France, one from Germany, and one from the UK.

You’ll get paid 5 pence for the UK viewer, but nothing for the other two.

As you can see – the total income you get from these three viewers will be 5 pence. That’s an average of about 1.7 pence per action, or 5 pence per paid action (be sure you know which one the advertiser is reporting – if the advertiser’s offer has been made through the Viral Ad Network, you can see the total number of actions (including non-paid) on your main dashboard page, and you can see the total number of paid actions on the “offers” page).

Placing a syndicated unit:

Let’s look at the profit you’ll make from the same three viewers coming when you have a syndicated unit up…

This time you’re paid for all three viewers (if you want to estimate how much you are paid for visitors on a per-country basis based on previous numbers, you can check on your Viral Ad Network dashboard).

As you can see – the total income you get from these three viewers will be 10 pence – twice as much as for the “5 pence” offer. That’s an average of 3.3 pence per action (price per action is now the same as price per paid action).

How can I estimate this for myself?

It’s worth considering these kind of calculations when you place any content on your site – and recent geo-location information is readily available for you to view on your dashboard once you’ve placed any of our content. The average prices paid will vary with demand though – so keep an eye on your most recent numbers to see what’s on offer.

Of course, we target on much more than the country users come from – and we’re constantly improving our targeting systems – so it’s also worth considering the average clickthrough rate as well – but I’ll save that for another time.

I would like to congratulate my esteemed co-worker and Viral Ad Network guru Alistair Stuart for the successful completion of his two day Knowledge Transfer Partnership course in ‘Project management and Essentials of Management’.

We held a 3 second graduation ceremony for Ally, which gave me just about enough time to take this snap on my phone:

Alistair Stuart BA PMEM, well done!