It’s time again for another push to our dashboard system.
Our dashboards will be off-line for a short while this afternoon, from about 2pm BST. As normal, you don’t need to worry about your ads showing, as this change will only effect your dashboards.
TimW
Our publisher dashboards will be off-line for a short period in the next few hours to allow us to perform an upgrade. Don’t worry - your ads will carry on showing, and you will still be paid as normal during this maintainance.
Good day, publishers!
Just a quick update/bit of news; from later today the following environmentally-conscious viral videos will be playing in your syndicated units, targeted at UK and US viewers. If you have strong UK and US traffic to your site and you still aren’t hosting a Fun Unit, email Ian and Matt and we will get one over to you…
1) WWF - It All Comes Back to You
2) WRAP - Printer Vs Bin
As those of you hosting syndicated Fun Units will know, your units now have their very own geo-targeting mechanism implemented to ensure that our content is shown to the right audience, and to display relevant fun stuff to the visitors of your site.
We realised that this was never announced as loudly as it should have been. Hopefully this should clarify things in enough detail and act as a reference point for you guys until it’s articulated better on the main site:
Geo-targeting allows us to continue to pay you for every view that comes to your site and clicks on our viral content. For example, if somebody from an Italian IP address visits your page, your Fun Unit will automatically display the most relevant content that we are serving for Italian users.
Many advertisers only want to pay for viewers from specific countries. By showing different ads to different users, we are able show each user the ads that will pay you the most. If we have nothing targeted at that specific country, we will show the next highest ad that is available world-wide. This ensures that you receive a payment for every click delivered through your Fun Unit, that the amount you get paid is optimised, and that your inventory isn’t going to waste.
Ker-ching!
Our main targets, based on advertiser trends from the last few months, are the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. This is where we are highly likely to be serving ads at any time, so publishers with significant traffic in any of these territories will currently benefit the most from hosting a Fun Unit. But rest assured, we’re constantly looking to expand these territories and provide those of you with valuable traffic elsewhere with a unit of your own soon!
We will also continue to offer managed placements as they come in for a set time periods and targets - and for a specified price for each territory. The same principles as above will apply, but the content isn’t syndicated and rotated.
Alternatively, if you have an Ad Unit on your site, we often specifically target certain campaigns directly into units. These placements will only be shown to users when our system feels that your site will earn more by showing this site-targetted ad than by showing one that is showing across the rest of the network.
We hope this is clear. Email us at publishers@viraladnetwork.net if you need any more specific details. Also, feel free to post any feedback to us that you may have, we always want to know what we can do better, and look into giving you the things that are going to make your life easier.
Cheers,
The Viral Ad Network team.
Following the addition of Mr. Pink to the Viral Ad Network, we have another new recruit, who is so far only known as Mr. Green. Only joking, Ally (if that is his real name) has joined us to help Ian with campaign management, and he’ll also be working on the VAN systems trying to make us as lean and mean as possible.
Welcome Ally
The scheduled update was completed successfully on Thursday.
New features that will be immediately viewable to you (as a publisher) include an updated help page, and the ability to customise the styling for Fun Links and generate the embed code direct from your dashboard.
Please note that Fun Units (gadgets) may show ads which do not display custom colours, although Fun Link Units will always display using your custom colours.
Please also note that you will have to update them embed code for your Ad Units in order for the unit colours to be updated on your website.
We are currently working on a range of new features to our reporting systems - both for publishers and advertisers.
We plan to make the changes live in the middle of next week (between the 28th and 30th of January), and you may find that your dashboards are not available for short periods during the update.
Importantly, our syndication and tracking services will continue to run during this period, so as a publisher you will continue to earn during this scheduled update.
Similarly to the way other popular networks work, actions counted by our tracking services are not added to publisher dashboards immediatly, and we will be pausing this feature during mainainance of the dashboards. When we re-start this feature there may be a large amount of data for our servers to process, which may take some time, so do not be worried if your numbers look a little low over this period, once the system has finished analysing every action the dashboards will be back to normal.
Tim Wintle
A very Happy New Year to all our publishers! December was an incredibly hectic month for us as advertisers squeezed out the last remnants of end of year budgets and launched sales driving campaigns for Christmas. In total we were running over 30 campaigns before the start of the New Year!
Of course in 2009 advertisers are going to be more meticulous than ever in assessing the performance of their budgets and efficacy of their campaigns… but this will mean we will be very well placed to attract more advertisers as our medium and content provides exactly those reporting tools and fastidiousness of targeting that advertisers desire. The upswing at the end of 2008 demonstrated just that and we have already been privy to forecasts and projections that suggest our client base will continue to grow throughout 2009.
Which means, of course, that we are on the look-out for more quality publishers. We have found that referrals from our current publishers have worked brilliantly and we would be delighted to know of any sites you would suggest.
Similarly we are finding that our new syndicated content units are performing very well for those publishers who have taken them up, taking time-consuming administrative tasks away and allowing greater flexibility of attractive content. We are always happy to work something bespoke out for your site so do let us know if you want to give them a try!
One large part of a website that many publishers miss out on monetising is their error pages.
By far the most common one is the 404 “file not found” error message, which can get shown for many different reasons - removing pages from your site, or making a typo in a link for example.
Most webmasters leave these pages with their default settings, but you can actually customise them as much as you want (there are several amusing examples).
The easiest way to make extra money off this extra traffic is to place one of our content units into the page - that way you don't have to manage updating the ads that are getting shown, and you can focus attention direct onto an advertising placement.
Here is an example 404 page we've put together with one of our gadget content units in the centre of the page (Gadget content units are still in beta)
If you have our content units in your site already, then we suggest that you request a new content unit from your contact at the viral ad network, so that you can see your 404 page income separately.
If you're using wordpress, this page is part of your theme folder, and you can edit it in the same way you would edit another page, including using a wordpress widget to insert the unit if that is your preferred method.
If you're using Apache, or a different system behind the Apache web server, then you would create a html page somewhere on your server, and add the following line to your configuration files (either .htaccess, httpd.conf or apache.conf depending on how your server is set up):
ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/your/error-document.html
(change “/path/to/your/error-document.html” to the path to your new html file)
Tim Wintle
We’re proud to announce the launch of our new style of publisher content unit.
We’ve been running our first styles of content unit in invitation-only beta for a little while but until now the ads that have been shown have been limited to text or image links to our content.
With the launch of our gadget content units we can now offer you the chance to embed the entertaining, viral content you’ve come to expect from us directly into your site…and get paid for it. And you get all the simplicity of our syndication system to boot.
A gadget unit can display any type of rich-media content securely in your website automatically. This content can include games, videos or any other rich-media.
Here’s an example gadget content unit:
It’s really easy to place a content unit on your page. We’ll provide you with a custom embed code which you’ll just need to include in the relevant place on your page. Then, our syndication system does the rest. Your embed code will look something like the example below (please don’t copy and paste this example, though — we’ll provide you with your own code if you want a gadget ad!):