knofun

Harrison Gervitz is a 16 year old kid who sounds like a 10 year vet of the industry. He recently posted a guest post on shoemoney entitled “Running an Ad Network (The Mechanics of Arbitrage) which is the best short piece on internet marketing I have ever read. If you are thinking of getting into making money on the internet this is a MUST READ.

other arbitrage, gervitz, harrison, marketing, shoemoney

I take my work pretty seriously (stop laughing!!!), so naturally there comes a time to measure up to your competition. For ZinText, that would be other in-text advertising networks like Kontera. So recently I found an average publisher that by chance was running both Zintext and Kontera on the same page. Aside from being a little shocked the code was all working properly with the two competing for space, I got a unique opportunity to see my lil baby in action against arguably the best among the competition (certainly the biggest).

On the homepage, we both linked the word “Nokia” in the first paragraph since it was mentioned twice. Here is what their ad looked like:

Uh, No Xplode? which links to: http://www.toseeka.com/search.php?q=No%2BXplode?? I don’t even know what No Xplode is or why it’s $39.99, but this didn’t seem too relevant to me.

Here’s our ad, same page, same paragraph:

Now I am not knocking Kontera, I know first-hand how hard it is to match relevant keywords to relevant advertising and I am not saying my product is perfect, but come on.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing in-text advertising, kontera, marketing, zintext

Was just reading about MySpace’s revenue woes on gawker and I was just amazed. Apparently their plan is

an ad network which lets his salespeople sell ads all over the Web, not just on MySpace and other News Corp. sites.The idea is to take what MySpace has learned about its own users and share it with publishers and advertisers, to better target ads. What behavioral insights Bain expects to garner from “thanks for the add” isn’t clear. But at this point the Fox Interactive Media Audience Network remains little more than a thought bubble

So I thought to myself, what would I do if I owned MySpace? Well, look at their top users. Mostly mainstream music acts, Models, etc. All people out there pushing a brand and making money through their profiles. So why not create an AdBrite type system where advertisers can buy ads on specific profiles, and MySpace shares revenues with the users? More traffic, happy advertisers, and happy users. You guys can just send the check to my PO box.

geek stuff, rant, web marketing internet, marketing, myspace

I have been using StumbleUpon’s Paid Ads for a few weeks now, and have some feedback.

Biggest thing: Budgets
Right now you can set a daily budget for all your ads, which seems cool but is really ineffective. This is compounded by some of the problems below and I will get into those. Yes I know you can in theory control this by using the # of visitors per campaign option, but is still not as effective as saying “spend $100 on this campaign per day.” This allows us to more accurately measure ROI using the SU program.

Setup vs options
When you set up a new campaign, you can only set destination url and one category. Once your campaign gets approved you can go in and add some paramaters like Country / State / City targeting and gender / age range of visitor. Cool, but why can’t I do that on setup? Also being able to select one category is really limiting. Why can’t I say show this page to people that have these 3 categories but NOT this one or show it to anyone who has any of these 3 categories? Seems pretty simple.

Let me know!
You have my email address, use it! Because of the manual approval process (which I understand completely, you don’t want spam/pr0n sites whatever), we have no idea when our campaigns go live. So you end up with a situation like I had this morning, where I had an old campaign in there that had run out of $$$ so wasn’t running. I added some new campaigns and then added some $$$ for them and went to sleep. When I checked them this afternoon the old campaign had resumed and sucked up most of my daily budget. So yeah its my bad for not pausing it, but at least let me know when campaigns are approved and start getting traffic. Also if I had a daily budget per campaign, this could be avoided.

Basically, I love SU’s ads program, $0.05 per semi-targeted visitor is cheap, and SU traffic is generally pretty good. I always average over 2 pageviews per user and under a 30% bounce rate. Pretty good no matter what your content is.

geek stuff, stumble, ventures, web marketing marketing, stumble, stumble upon, traffic