WebProNews » AdBrite

Live Nation Jams With AdBrite

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:46:09 +0000

Concert promoter Live Nation partnered with the AdBrite network on its eFan Finder to help the company track the thousands of shows it presents annually.

Fan interest in music extended to the Internet rapidly as they sought out information about artists from other fans about upcoming shows and other details. Musicians and labels quickly followed; indeed, MySpace likely owes its success to being a destination for music fans too.

Web savvy over music became a necessity, with Live Nation creating a new tool to help its many connected promoters, artist managers, and agents see how well their advertisements for shows catch the attention of the fans they want to reach.

Those music industry pros will be able to use the tool, eFan Finder, to create and track ad campaigns presented on the AdBrite network of 50,000 sites. Geo-targeting options for campaigns should keep ads in focus for local fans where a show will be taking place.

Previously, Live Nation used AdBrite to promote shows for Van Halen and Maroon 5. The extended partnership will put AdBrite in connection with a massive number of live music acts; executed properly, AdBrite founders Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise should see the value of their network rise well.

AdBrite Receives $23 Million In Funding

Doug Caverly — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:13:12 +0000

If we’re heading towards (or already in) a recession, it isn’t yet hurting online advertising much – AdBrite, which specializes in that field, just received $23 million in funding.

It wasn’t a lone wolf investor who ponied up the amount, either – hugely important Sequoia Capital joined in the Series C round, and DAG Ventures and Mitsui Ventures appear to have put in a few dollars, as well. Sequoia alone, having backed Apple, Google, and Yahoo in the past, would be enough to turn heads.

So we’ll buy the explanation of Ignacio Fanlo, AdBrite’s CEO, who stated, “A steady succession of product innovations – including BritePic, Full Page Ad, and our new Facebook App Channel – have fueled AdBrite’s rapid growth.” It’s also quite believable that “[t]his additional funding . . . will help accelerate our expansion.”

Fanlo didn’t name any specific ways in which the company will expand, but it’s already added Peter Sealey, a former Coca-Cola exec, to its board of directors. This may help it buddy up to the soda giant, and AdBrite is likely to seek new clients, regardless.

The company proudly noted that only Google and Advertising.com are ahead of it in terms of page views, so it would seem that a sort of race is on. Last one to get sucked down by a floundering economy wins!

Google Pilots AdSense To Video

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:12:45 +0000

A closed pilot program for video ads on AdSense will launch this week; it’s a limited test that give online video publishers control of the ad displays.

Online video, we hear, is the latest and greatest thing since Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet. It’s reaching a point where the norm is to find a three to five minute video on sites that used to be able to deliver the same content in text, which could be read in under a minute.

I know what you’re thinking. “David, you are a fossil. Online writers are a dying breed, and you should be pleased to feel the crush of evolution at your throat.” Fine. Think that way. I’ll be waiting for evolution with a smile and half of Cold Steel’s inventory.

The people have voted with their browsing habits, however, and video has been a big winner. Witness Google’s purchase of YouTube as validation. Video online offers a level of control for people that broadcast models could never hope to approach.

A few fortunate site publishers will get to try the next great thing from Google AdSense. Christine Lee, AdSense Product Marketing Manager, talked about it on the Google AdSense blog.

“With this pilot, publishers control when the ads play in their videos and choose which videos get the ads,” Lee said. She also provided a nice recap of Google’s video ad efforts to date:

Click-to-play video ads: This is a video ad type on our content network. Any publisher opted into image ads and using one of the supported formats may see these click-to-play video ads on their sites.

AdSense video distribution and sponsorship: We ran 2 pilots that allowed publishers to choose video channels (short-form video clips bundled with video ads) to display on their sites.
AdSense for Video pilot: This is what we’re announcing today – we’re extending AdSense to online video content. Publishers in this test will be able to define at what point in their videos that streaming video ads will appear.

If the test proves profitable, you can bet more publishers will want in on the AdSense video ad program. That will give Google a new challenge: building up an inventory of video advertisements for AdSense display.

We expect Google will keep a tight grip on the number of publishers involved until they can bring in enough advertisers willing to pay what should be a premium for video ad placement.

Adbrite’s InVideo Ads

Brajeshwar Oinam — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:59:36 +0000

AdBrite recently introduced their InVideo Ads. Here are some of the feartures (excerpt from their site):

* Fully customizable video player, easy-to-use, and 100% free

* Brand your videos with your own custom logo "watermark"

* "Split-screen" ads engage users without interrupting viewing experience

* Sharing features promote your site when your videos get "viral"

* Earn money from your videos, even when they’re embedded into other peoples’ Web sites

You’ve got to register your video in their system and embed the HTML code into your site or blog.

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Small Ad Marketplaces: Can They Get Big?

Pat McCarthy — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 16:20:44 +0000

The past couple of years has been great for online advertising.

The market has grown tremendously, and with it there are more options out there for publishers and advertisers to get together to make money. I’m a big fan of this as a long time web publisher and small advertiser. I don’t want one or two companies dominating the online advertising world because I know that competition brings out the best in companies and choice is very important.

That being said, while I support and love to see the multitude of “ad marketplace” type of companies on the market, I see some things that make me wonder how they will get to be major players in the space.

So who am I talking about here? In the past two years we’ve seen Adbrite, BlogAds, Performancing Partners, Adify, Adster, and other marketplaces where advertisers essentially directly buy on publishers sites. There are some differences in these companies’ models, but they all hold true to the idea that advertisers buy on publishers or some type of category of publishers.

As a publisher I’ve found these solutions to be easy to work with, and have had moderate success with some of them. From my experiences and what I’ve found out from others, the biggest sites in their “marketplaces” tend to do the best from them, which is really no surprise. The biggest problem though is that often there just aren’t enough advertisers buying my sites, and many others have given me that feedback, and this is a crucial problem. If publishers don’t get ad buys through them, what’s the point in leaving the space available on your site and dealing with yet another ad provider?

Let’s look at it from an advertiser point of view. I’ve used a few of these sites as an advertiser as well. Again, they’ve done a pretty good job with the experience, but there are some inherent problems.

1. Volume and Time

The most popular platform for online advertising is Google Adwords. Although Adwords is a well-made product, the primary reason for that is because Adwords delivers quality and volume through Google Search. Advertisers can spend the time and effort to learn the Adwords interface because it will drive a high enough volume of clicks and conversions to make it worth the time. Because there is so much volume, it also allows lots of clicks to be bought at a low cost.

There is a huge drop off from the number that buy on Adwords to the number that buy on the next biggest self-service platform, which would be Yahoo Search Marketing. Then an even bigger drop off to MSN Adcenter. Then an even bigger drop off to these small marketplaces. Why does this occur? Each ad system I work with as an advertiser is another thing to learn, and to spend time on, and people use Google primarily because of the volume (and quality). You spend a few hours setting things up, and you get a large number of clicks and conversions. You spend the same time buying on a smaller marketplace and you aren’t going to get close to as much volume.

With these other smaller ad marketplaces, each one is a new interface to learn, and advertisers aren’t sure if they can drive the necessary volume to dedicate the effort to trying it out or sticking with it. I’ve tried a few of them and had this exact experience. It’s not always a case of just increasing your budget either. If you are looking for targeted traffic, you can’t just blow the bank on a small marketplace trying to drive larger volume and get what you want. So in my tests, I spent the time to learn these new marketplaces but couldn’t drive enough volume to justify continually monitoring and spending money there. My failure as an advertiser in turn hurts the publisher on the other side because they are no longer getting my money.

2. Hitting ROI

Additionally, very few ad marketplaces provide feedback on ROI, or guarantee that as an advertiser you’ll hit your ROI goals. In fact, I don’t think any of them do, although using Google conversion code and Google Analytics you can figure it out. Anyway, my point is that as an advertiser, I have to track and watch all the ads I’m buying to make sure I stay profitable. For the few places that provide me volume, I’ll do the manual effort with spreadsheets or some third-party application to track my ROI. Will I really have time as an advertiser to watch my ROI and check my profitability on a bunch of smaller buys on all the ad marketplaces? Personally I found that I didn’t.

What does this mean for the future?

How do these smaller “ad marketplaces” get to the next step? I don’t have the golden answer. You can tackle the volume problem by getting more quality inventory, but how do you get more quality inventory unless you are getting lots of advertisers spending their money with you? Do you shrink your revenue share to increase payouts in the short term? Do you focus on building publisher tools that allow them to work with you before you have the advertisers? It may just be that the company that can grind it out the best will win. But perhaps it means someone needs to take the next step in evolution? Perhaps it’s a company that opens all their data up for any use?

In regards to meeting ROI for advertisers automatically, on the Right Media Exchange advertisers can specify ROI goals that our technology then works to hit for them. At this point we don’t have a small to medium-sized advertiser solution, but if we do you can bet hitting ROI will be part of it.

It will be interesting to watch it play out. All the competition is good for publishers, but if all the ad money is fragmented out across all the small marketplaces it makes it hard for publishers to work with all of them to get the maximum revenue.

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.

AdBrite And Behavioral Targeting

Andy Beal — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 15:28:09 +0000

Ad network AdBrite has announced the addition of behavioral targeting to its ads.

As ClickZ reports AdBrite will be

“using cookie-based behavioral data to fine tune targeting on demographics rather than on purchase likelihoodthe company will do this by assigning individual Web users a probable age and gender based on their recent Web activity within its network. That data is supplemented with race and income information it gets by marrying U.S. census information to IP-based geographical information. Additional site-based user data comes from comScore.”

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

How the Most Highly Visited Blogs Earn Money

Darren Rowse — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:04:56 +0000

Yesterday I spent the afternoon wading through some of the most highly visited blogs going around at …

… Truth Laid Bear’s Traffic Ranking page which ranks those blogs with Sitemeter statistics. I quite often head over there to keep track of who is doing what. Whilst it doesn’t track all blogs it does give you a hint at what blogs people are reading in terms of topic.

Today I was surfing through the top 30 of these blogs and I started to keep track of how many of them have some sort of income stream (whether it be ads, affiliate programs, donation buttons, merchandise for sale etc). I did the same exercise informally about 12 months ago and found that just over half of the top blogs had income streams. This year I found that things have changed – the Blogosphere is becoming more commercial (or at least the most highly visited blogs are). I’ll outline what each of the top 30 are doing to earn an income below – but let me first share some initial findings:

All blogs in the top 30 have an income stream. Only one blog had no advertising or affiliate programs (it did have a donation button though).
The most popular Income Stream on these Blogs is BlogAds – 23 of the top 30 have them.
The next most popular income streams were donation buttons and Amazon links (mainly to books).
Also popular were AdBrite text ads.
Only 8 of these blogs use Adsense.

There are plenty of other observations to be made from what I found but I’ll let you chew over them a little and make your own remarks below in comments. Here are the notes I took on each of the top 30 blogs in the list:

One note of explanation – I deleted two of the blogs listed in Truth Laid Bear’s Traffic Ranking page due to them being duplicated in the list. The numbers below are their daily visitors (averaged from their last 7 days traffic).

1) Daily Kos – 443841 visits/day – Runs Blog Ads (15 currently running) ranging in price from $13000 per month for the premium position down to the classified position at $500 per month)

2) Gizmodo – 175706 visits/day – Runs a variety of Ads including an Affiliate program with CNET, a variety of private sponsorships and button ads, text ads using AdBrite ($400 per four week campaign). They also run Adsense ads on individual and category pages. Details on their Advertising Rates.

3) Instapundit.com – 129981 visits/day – Runs BlogAds (8 ads currently showing) – ranging in price from 6000 per month for the Patron Position to Classified $500 per month. They also have a Donation Button and Amazon affiliate links.

4) Gawker – 104460 visits/day – Runs a variety of sponsorship/banner and affiliate ads (CNET again). They also have AdBrite text ads available at a cost of $600 per 4 week campaign. More information on their Ad packaages.

5) Eschaton – 103837 visits/day – Running BlogAds (currently with which range in price from $2500 per month down to $100 for a classified ad. They also include a donate button and see to be running an affiliate program with a book store.

6) Defamer – 91942 visits/day – Similar to the above Gawker blogs with CNET affiliate program, banner ads, text ads with AdBrite ($450 per four week campaign). More on their ad packages.

7) lgf: journey heaven is a funky moose – 82475 visits/day – Blog ads (currently running 10) which range in price from $2750 per month for the premium spot down to $800 for a second tier ad). They are also running Amazon affiliate and have options for donations.

Power Line – 62304 visits/day – Blog ads (currently running 11) which range in price from $1400 down to $450 per month. They also have an ad for an insurance company (could be CPM or could be affiliate ad). Lastly they have a store which sells merchandise (t-shirts, cups, caps etc).

9) Wonkette – 54963 visits/day – Similar deal here to the other Gawker Blogs with the exception of some BlogAds (currently running 10) ranging in price from $1700 per month down to $650 per month). Their AdBrite text ads are $150 for 4 weeks. They also sell Wonkette T-Shirts. More details on their ad packages.

10) www.AndrewSullivan.com – Daily Dish – 48804 visits/day – BlogAds (3 currently running) range from $3200 down to $250 for 4 weeks. Andrew also runs Adsense ads on a few pages, with a few Amazon affiliate ads and runs a successful Tipping Point’ donations campaign.

11) Michelle Malkin – 45661 visits/day – Also runs BlogAds (six at present) ranging in price from $1900 to $650 per month.

12) The Smirking Chimp – 41947 visits/day – Runs BlogAds (2 at present) at a cost of $425 per month. They also run some amazon affiliate ads and a merchandise store.

13) The Washington Monthly – 41482 visits/day – BlogAds (4 of them today) cost $395 per month. They also have affiliate links for Amazon, Adsense ads and a Donate button. You can of course also subscribe to the print edition.

14) Go Fug Yourself – 38742 visits/day – BlogAds (7 of them) cost $275 per month). They also sell t-shirts.

15) Blog for America – 33746 visits/day – No ads that I can see – but you can make a contribution/donation.

16) HughHewitt.com – 26517 visits/day – Currently 5 BlogAds running – the cost of which is $1000 per month. You can also buy Hugh’s book via an affiliate link on the sidebar where he has a few other books linked to also. There is also a site sponsor banner ad and a tip/donation button.

17) Captain’s Quarters – 20817 visits/day – BlogAds (currently 23) cost between $200 for premium ads to $125 for second tier ads per month. They also have affiliate links (amazon) in their sidebar as well as a donation button.

18) Lifehacker – 19185 visits/day – Similar to other Gawker Blogs with a range of banner ads (some served by double click – impression based I guess). Details of their advertising.

19) Blogcritics.org – 16078 visits/day – This blog focuses heavily upon Amazon affiliate links (they are in every post). They also have 3 BlogAds ads at ranging from $700 to $210 per month. There are also a few other affiliate program ads scattered around their blog.

20) Wizbang – 15379 visits/day – BlogAds (2 at present) ranging in price from $500 to $100 per month. They also have a text link or two on the sidebar through AdBrite ($150 per 4 week campaign) as well as amazon affiliate links to books.

21) washingtonpost.com – White House Briefing – 15125 visits/day – Has a variety of ads including banner ads and text ads run via a number of systems including Overture, doubleclick etc.

22) The Volokh Conspiracy – 14337 visits/day – Runs a DoubleClick campaign at the top of its sidebar as well as a donation button.

23) Kim du Toit – Daily Rant – 14179 visits/day – BlogAds (currently 4) cost $140 per month. They also accept donations via PayPal.

24) PoliPundit.com – 14025 visits/day – BlogAds (currently range from $280 to $140. They also run Adsense ads in their sidebar and some sort of impression based ad or affiliate program on individual pages under posts.

25) MyDD – 13964 visits/day – Blog Ads here cost $500 for premium ads and $100 for classifieds per month – they currently have two running.

26) Drudge Retort: Red Meat for Yellow Dogs – 13667 visits/day – This blog runs a variety of ads including Adsense Ads across the top of their blog and BlogAds (currently 3) which cost $200 per month.

27) Roger L. Simon: Mystery Novelist and Screenwriter – 13388 visits/day – Roger runs BlogAds (currently 3) which cost between $800 and $300 per month. He also has Adsense ads in his sidebar and affiliate links to his books as well as a donate paypal button.

28) Matthew Yglesias – 13353 visits/day – BlogAds here as well (currently 6) ranging in price from $220 to $130.

29) Crooks and Liars 12933 visits/day – BlogAds here (3 at present) cost between $230 and $75 for a month campaign. They also run Adsense Ads in the side bar, accept donations

30) Digital Photography Blog – 112518 visits/day – The most prominant ads here are Adsense ads on all pages. There are also Adsense Adlinks and is a Adsense Search Bar. There are also Amazon affiliate programs, BlogAds (2) at $107 per month, text links from $49 per month and other affiliate programs.

Ok – I spent too much time on this today so I’ll stop now. I’ve got a few more observations and reflections to make – but I’ll open it up for some discussion first. What strikes you about these blogs? Looking forward to your comments below in comments.

Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.

Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.