Firetop

I’m just starting to recover having logged out of the ’social networking’ site Yuwie. I thought I’d take a look at how viable the site’s business model is - stickiness of content etc. so I created a new profile. In the process of doing so I had to click ’skip’ to fifteen concurrent pages offering me debt advice, mortgage advice and all manor of other rather suspicious looking offers before I could even edit my profile… many were repeated over and over again. Once on my profile page I managed to load up a photo of myself before the strobbing ‘PC error’ style leaderboard adverts made me feel positively sick (I kid you not). So stickiness this site definitely doesn’t have, it’s main attractor is the ‘revenue share’ deal offered to all members. (more…)

It seems that Christmas comes twice a year with Google Adsense - for this blog at least; it’s been almost 4 months since the last $100 payout and now another little $100 of ad revenue coming my way. What a shame that the dollar gets weaker with each passing day, and that the income of $200 only just about covers the portion of server hosting fees. Thank goodness I didn’t start this website to get rich… I did at least manage to double the click through rates towards the end of the year, should make at least $300 in 2008, woohoo!

This time last year I was advocating that Flash 7.0 be the most up-to-date version that should be quoted for online advertising creatives in 2007, with Flash 8.0 penetration only at 70/80%. This year, having looked at the latest statistics from Millward Brown’s research (available on Adobe) and read the blog of the Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player (Emmy Huang), Flash 9.0 is already at 93.3% in mature markets. Clearly this is a marked improvement on the situation one year ago, and I think it means we can say Flash 9.0 exports will be quite acceptable for ad servers in 2008 without impacting too much on campaign delivery / forecasts. (more…)

For me the biggest problem with selling online advertising at a decent profit is time because, as we all know, time is money. Sales people, ad traffickers and senior management time is an overhead that publishers could do without when selling online campaigns. Unfortunately all three groups of people usually need to be involved from liaising with media buyers, trafficking ad creatives, providing reports and analysing yields. With the long tail of niche micro campaigns to monetise, publishers are struggling to get their heads around the most profitable way forward, especially given their inherited print workflows – free of the metrics headache. (more…)

This evening I finally became an official ‘Google-approved qualified individual’… some 1,951 days after I created my first Google Adwords campaign for a client way back in 2002. 116 online multiple choice questions to get through, but it was easier that I anticipated and I completed it in half the alloted ninety minutes. It would have been pretty shocking for me to fail I suppose… having created over 100 campaigns in the past five years - but at least I finally forked out the £25 and got official recognition. Next up - adding the official logo to this blog I guess.

Technorati Tags: google accreditation, google adwords, google exam

A three week holiday from blogging and I’m back, it didn’t really start out as the plan but became a necessity when I took on rather a lot of work launching a new website for a Firetop client, overhauling a whole site for another, and finally getting the next Firetop Ltd project rolling. Yesterday I attended rather a good 1-day conference at Brighton’s Corn Exchange called ‘Widgety Goodness‘ - an odd sounding title I suppose if you’re not familiar with widgets in a ‘non-A-level economics’ / ‘non beer-drinking’ sense. Essentially it covered the onward march of the mini-applications used by people within Social Networks like Facebook, and custom home pages like iGoogle to define themselves and/or access relevant content from web publishers. (more…)