Today we open our self service ADSDAQ Ad Exchange “Selling Desk” for small and medium size content publishers. Any publisher can now join over 1,000 leading larger publishers such as A&E, RagingBull.com and Salary.com and over 100 of the comScore 250’s largest publishers and trade advertising impressions on the ADSDAQ Exchange.

It’s one big Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Main Street, Your Street mash-up!

Using an easy “1-2-3” set-up process, a publisher can name its CPM “AskPrice” when ADSDAQ shows banner advertisements from one of its 350 brand name advertisers on a publisher web site.

When the ADSDAQ exchange cannot meet the publisher’s AskPrice, it will serve ad tags from one or more back-up ad networks designated by the publisher. This ad trafficking and serving is provided for free as part of the ADSDAQ Selling Desk.

A full 83% of publishers in the early testing of our self service Selling Desk said they would recommend the service to others.

For about 5-10 minutes of set-up time, here is how the ADSDAQ Exchange Selling Desk works for “SmallPublisher.com” with one million (1,000,000) monthly impressions:

• SmallPublisher.com currently works with one ad network, let’s say Google Adsense but it could be anyone (Advertising.com, BURST Media, Tribal Fusion, whoever).
• Adsense currently pays the publisher $1,000/month or a $1 eCPM.
• SmallPublisher.com sets its CPM AskPrice in ADSDAQ to $1.20, a 20% premium to its current price (most of our sellers ask for a 10-20% premium over their back-up network(s)).
• ADSDAQ is able to clear, or sell 50% or 500,000 of SmallPublisher.com’s impressions each month for $1.20 CPM or $600 total.
• The remaining 50% or 500,000 impressions are sold by Google Adsense for the same $1 eCPM or $500.
• For 5-10 minutes of work, SmallPublisher.com will make an additional $100 dollars/month or an additional $1,200 dollars/year.

Not bad for 10 minutes of work.

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-- Jay Sears



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I love designing software for people because it is all about taking a complex goal and making it easy for people to achieve. And as the Dalai Lama once said “Simplicity is the key to happiness in the modern world.” Here are 2 methods I used to accomplish simplifying a complex goal within the ADSDAQ Selling Desk:

Method #1: Map out all the customer decisions and the application’s messages back to the user in a process and then eliminate as many as possible from the primary customer process flow. Keep it as simple as possible at the foundation, and let the users explore to find the more advanced options over time.

The Real World Execution: All the info that a user must supply to our application (like the CPM price they demand for the ad space they are making available) lies right in the main path of the basic setup. All the info that can have generally acceptable default values lies tucked away into Advanced Options groupings (like Ad Blocking and Text Ad Settings) that are initially collapsed and hidden unless a user chooses to take the time to customize them.

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-- Derek Brinkman



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With so much news released about new technologies - including Web 2.0 community and messaging applications - it’s difficult to determine what’s important and what isn’t.One of my favorite methods of keeping track of what’s going on is using Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme - a terrific site that distills the blogosphere’s “conversation” and provides links to great content in the process.

As you can see from Gabe’s blog, I’m not the only who likes his site. It appears that the entire A-list of technology bloggers currently use Techmeme including Dan Farber, Michael Arrington, Vaughn Ververs, Om Malik at GigaOm, Tom Evslin - and PC World even named Mr. Rivera one of its 50 Most Important People on the Web.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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Has the ‘walled garden’ of the music industry finally come down? Did Steve Jobs of Apple (Computer) get the industry to bend to his will and offer downloads with no digital rights management software attached? Does Steve Jobs wear turtlenecks?

Answers: kind of, yes and yes.

The “walled garden” lost a few “bricks” this week as EMI became the first music company to agree to a no DRM wrapper as announced by EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli yesterday.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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Google has launched a beta Cost-Per-Action program where the advertiser can choose to pay only when the user has performed an “action” defined by the advertiser. These ads will run only on the AdSense publishers who opt-in to run these ads, not on the Google Search results page.

Is it fair for Google to expect the publishers in the AdSense network to shoulder all the risk of the users converting for the advertisers when they themselves are not willing to shoulder this risk on their own search results page?

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-- Shanthi Sarkar



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The world of podcasting is another example of the opportunity available to advertisers and publishers who can harness the Long Tail of the Web. Today’s USA Today article entitled, “Get an earful of offbeat podcasts” sums it up by saying:

The surprise about podcasting isn’t that millions are listening — the surprise is that millions are listening to some fairly arcane stuff.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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By now, you’ve heard several weeks of very public announcements and recriminations between copyright holders and the website owners who use their copy-written content without permission. The key offender to date has been YouTube which has ‘earned’ a $1 Billion lawsuit from Viacom, producers of such hit cable networks as Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV and many others.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch has a timely post today on an Ajax-laden March Madness game available on PicksPal. For those not in the know, ‘March Madness’ is the annual rite of spring where the NCAA men’s and women’s collegiate basketball worlds have tournaments to decide the eventual national champions.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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The Internet Advertising Bureau reported its estimate on Fourth Quarter 2006 online advertising revenue of $16 billion today:

…revenues for 2006 are estimated at $16.8 billion, a 34 percent increase over the previous revenue record of $12.5 billion in 2005. The 2006 Q4 revenues totaled just under $4.8 billion, making it the highest quarter reported. Fourth-quarter revenues for 2006 represent a 32 percent increase over the same period in 2005, and a 15 percent increase over Q3 of 2006, estimated at slightly under $4.2 billion.

Clearly, the shift of advertising dollars to online continues at a breakneck pace. Peter Petrusky, at PricewaterhouseCoopers states:

The maturation of the Internet as an effective advertising medium is directly tied to its ability to deliver qualified audiences to marketers.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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The blogosphere is always generating - and referencing - a ton of great data. This time, in a recent post on the blogosphere by Pranam Kolari on eBiquity, he suggests that the use of “I” is experiencing a downward trend and that this correlates with the number of english language posts having plateaued. Though he is not explicit, I am guessing that Mr. Kolari assumes bloggers use the word “I” in their posts because they are often referencing their opinions and therefore “I” is a good gauge.

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-- Tiffany Sumner



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