Tag Archives: Monetization

BuySellAds Now Offering iOS Ad Framework

Oct 25, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

BuySellAds, the ad marketplace popular among internet and computer blogs, recently released a Cocoa framework for displaying ad zones in OS X applications. In a not unexpected, but certainly intriguing, turn of events, they have now released a version of the framework for iOS.

Yes, that means BuySellAds is coming to the iPhone and iPad. Think about that for a minute.

There are now three major ad networks available for app developers to use in their products. Apple’s own iAd, with it’s fun and user-friendly interactive mini applications; Google’s AdMob banners; and now BuySellAds. The big difference between BuySellAds and the other two is that you get final approval before an ad is displayed in your application. Also, the advertisers pay a fixed amount to run their banner for a specific stretch of time, while Apple’s and Google’s offerings cycle different banners in using an automated targeting algorithm.

Choice is good, and some developers will definitely benefit from having BuySellAds as an option.

Why Are People So Irrational About the Price of iPhone Apps?

Oct 15, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization 2 Comments

Why is it that iPhone/iPod owners can be so picky about the prices of apps after they fork over $300 on an iPod Touch or a few thousand for a 2-year iPhone contract? I see it all the time. People complain about a useful application that they would use every day costing less than half the price of a Big Mac at McDonalds.

I don’t get it.

There is some really great software in the app store, but the developers aren’t making as much money as they probably should be for their efforts. Believe me, software development isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time and frustration to build an amazing application, whether it’s an iPhone app or a web application. It bothers me that developers can barely get away with charging $1.99 for anything but a game. Tweetie, back before Twitter bought it and made it their free official app, was well worth its $2.99 price tag. I might have paid more for if the price had been a little higher. Many users would not have. After all, there was a big “outrage” about 1.0 users having to pay $1.99 for Tweetie 2.

I don’t think most people fully appreciate what it takes to develop software. I imagine the same problem is true for other fields. (Auto mechanics come to mind. Everyone whines about how much it costs to get their car fixed, but the garages have to pay for parts and labor somehow…)

What do you think? Should developers be able to charge more without scaring away customers and/or sending them into an entitlement-fueled rage? Am I too biased? Or should all software be free and GPL’d and all that Stallmanesque craziness?

Less is More: BuySellAds Launches AdPacks

Oct 13, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

Instead of having a bunch of banner ads, wouldn’t it be better to have just one high quality one in a prominent place? That’s the premise of networks like Fusion Ads and The Deck. Now BuySellAds, the large ad marketplace that I use here on Webmaster-Source, is launching a side network that works in the same way.

AdPacks is an exclusive invitation-only ad network split into three topical categories. Publishers display a single ad zone that randomly cycles through the network’s banners. Advertisers pay $399-$599 to advertise network-wide and each site in the network gets a cut of the money.

The basic idea is “less is more.” Instead of bombarding users with advertisers, the advertisers pay more to be the center of attention. If their product is the only one being advertisers, there’s less to distract from the one ad.

I would love to get in on this, but I’m probably not cool enough. It seems like AdPacks would pay better as well as creating less on-screen clutter.

BuySellAds Coming to OS X Applications

Sep 29, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

This has been in the works for awhile, but Mac AppStorm is reporting that BuySellAds is finally putting ads in OS X applications. If you have a Cocoa application, you can use an API to inject ad zones into your application. The ad zones appear in the BuySellAds marketplace just like any website, but the ads will be pulled-into your program. Bodega and the Kiwi Twitter client are both using the ads.

This is something that I have been wanting to see for some time. We have already seen a few free internet-connected applications, such as Evernote and Tweetie for Mac, supported by Fusion Ads and The Deck. It’s cool to have BuySellAds, a less exclusive network, offer a similar option to developers.

My big question is: will this work for iPhone apps? Cocoa and CocoaTouch are similar frameworks, and it would be interesting to see BuySellAds as a potential competitor to iAd and AdMob. (iAd is simply perfect for the iPhone, though. Plain banners can’t quite compete in that regard…)

Apple’s iAd Platform the “Most Progressive Thing to Date” in Online Advertising

Aug 20, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Monetization No Comments

“We feel pretty strongly that this is the way to capitalize on where the mobile Web is heading,” said Chad Jacoby, a senior manager of Nissan’s media operations. “What iAd promises is the most progressive thing I’ve seen to date” in digital advertising.

Advertisers and developers alike are very happy with Apple’s iAd platform. Developers like that they get paid a lot more than they would through other networks and advertisers like that users are much more likely to interact with the advertisements. Applications running iAds are seeing CPM rates as high as $25.

Dictionary.com said on Wednesday that the amount it could charge for its ad space had increased 177% since it enabled iAds in its iPhone app, and CBS Mobile Senior Vice President Rob Gelick said the company’s six apps — including apps for CBS Sports, CNET, and GameSpot, were seeing up to $25 CPMs (the cost advertisers pay for an add to appear a thousand times.)

On the other end of the scale, advertisers are reporting a much greater user engagement. Users spend more time with the iAds than with ordinary banners, and they are much more likely to “click” them. It can be expected that people would spend more time with the ads, seeing as the whole point of the platform is to provide information and entertainment without leaving the confines of the app. Ordinary display ads whisk the user away as soon as they click.

Nissan, which created a multilayer interactive ad for its electric LEAF car, said customers spent an average of 90 seconds with the ad — 10 times longer than interaction times for comparable online ads. Moreover, people chose to “tap” on the Leaf iAd five times more frequently than they clicked on regular online display ads for the Leaf.

If you haven’t seen an iAd yet, be sure to see this YouTube video of the Nissan ad. It shows-off the benefits of the platform (from the perspective of end users) pretty well.

I have high hopes for the iAd network, both as a blogger interested in seeing the advertising industry shaken-up and as someone getting started with iPhone application development.

Lord of the Rings Online to Switch to “Freemium” Model

Jun 23, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

I’ve always been a fan of the “freemium” business model, particularly in video games. I previously mentioned how Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online saw a 500% increase in revenue after switching to a free-plus-paid-extras approach. I play DDO a bit, and I really like the way it works. You can pay five dollars here and there for additional content packs, which you only have to buy once, instead of having $12-$15 siphoned off every month.

Now Turbine is going to see if they can replicate their success with another title: Lord of the Rings Online. It’s currently a subscription game, operating in much the same way as World of WarCraft with a $15 monthly subscription after you’ve already paid for a retail box or download.

It’s nice to see the more accessible freemium model gaining ground against the standard subscription route. It seems to work pretty well for both customers and the publishers. The question remains: will Blizzard give freemium a shot, what with their plateauing subscriptions? I’ve been hoping the MMORPG giant would give it a try for awhile.

The move to make Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play shows Warner Bros. is serious about making a big investment in the Lord of the Rings franchise, which some say may have peaked with the Peter Jackson movie trilogy. But Warner is betting that the interest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is everlasting. That’s why it gathered together all of the game rights from Turbine and Electronic Arts. Warner also owns the film rights now.

Lord of the Rings Online goes free-to-play this fall [GamesBeat]

iAds: Apple Reinvents Mobile Advertising

Apr 23, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization One Comment

One of the things Steve Jobs announced in the iPhone OS 4.0 keynote was Apple’s new advertising platform, “iAds.” It’s something I have high hopes for. I think it will promote the development of more free applications.

What’s so special about iAds? For starters, clicking on one of the small banners doesn’t take you out of your application. It just opens an overlay with an HTML5-powered “mini application” from the advertiser, which you can then exit at any time.

The page displayed when you tap an advertisement is very interactive. Video and sound can be streamed to you, freebies like iPhone wallpapers can be downloaded. You can even play little HTML5 games.

Another example Jobs showed-off a few times was using the location tools to help find nearby store or movie theater locations. Imagine clicking a Pizza Hut or Dunkin Donuts ad and having it show you where to find the nearest franchise location.

Continue reading →

Apple to Launch a Mobile Ad Platform on April 7th?

Mar 30, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

There have been some interesting rumors going around in Apple land again. MediaPost is convinced that Apple is going to announce a mobile ad platform called “iAd” on April 7th.

Precise details of the system and its features could not be discerned at presstime (and calls to Apple had not been returned), but it is believed to have been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million, and it is expected to be the first real battle of a Silicon Valley Holy War between Apple and arch frenemy Google that is shifting its front line to Madison Avenue.

I know, the idea seemed a little outlandish to me at first, too. After pondering the thought of an Apple ad network for awhile, it started to make sense.

Apple has two devices that are similar, but radically different in their intended usage, and they both are good candidates for an ad network.

The iPad is intended to be a media consumption device. It’s form factor is supposed to make it a device to read magazines, news and books on. With Apple pushing for publications to make their content available on the iPad and iPhone, doesn’t it make sense for them to provide a premium ad network to make the move more profitable for both parties. With a New York Times iPad application, a Wired app, and more on the way, doesn’t it seem like a comprehensive in-app advertising solution would be an attractive deal for publishers?

The iPhone is primarily used on-the-go. Its users pull it out to find nearby restaurants, check movie show times, buy train tickets, or make other informational or monetary transactions one does while out and about. Geolocation could really be a game-changer for some forms of advertising. Suppose you’re looking for a restaurant in the Yelp application. If you’ve enabled the app to have permission to geolocate you, it could forward your location to the Apple ad network and display ads for restaurants nearby.

Apple has a chance to build an ad network that does things differently. If they impose strict guidelines on the advertisers allowed in, so as to be useful to the user while not becoming too intrusive, they could have a hit. How often do you find ads to be useful? If Apple can break that paradigm, they’ll have done something truly revolutionary.

Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher on Ad Blocking

Mar 12, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Monetization No Comments

I’ve written at length before on the subject of ad blocking and how it hurts your favorite websites. My diatribes have been a little strongly worded in the past, which may blunt the effect I intended them to evoke. Fortunately, a much larger site than I has published an article on the subject, and their article, I believe, does a better job at explaining the publishers’ side of things.

Ars Technica’s Editor-in-Chief, Ken Fisher, recently penned Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love, a piece that presents, quite well, the facts of what ad blocking does to a website.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising.

Whether you block ads or not, I encourage you to read the full article. Even if you think you have made-up your mind on the matter, you should still see what the editor of one of the largest (and highest-quality) tech news sites has to say.

When someone blocks ads on a website they frequent, they are taking money from a company that has to somehow pay its employees and provide funds to run servers. It may not be a pleasant fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t relish the idea of paying subscriptions for websites.

I don’t ask that you give-up ad blocking entirely. (After all, how would we have survived the pop-up infestation of the ’90s without resorting to blocking them?) I do, however, encourage the adoption of less aggressive blocking rules, and that you whitelist your favorite sites.

BuySellAds Introduces Asynchronous Ad Serving

Feb 11, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Monetization No Comments

BuySellAds, the ad network that I use on Webmaster-Source, has introduced a cutting-edge ad-serving feature. Their new asynchronous ad serving script dramatically speeds up page loading times, as the browser doesn’t have to wait around for the ads to load.

Todd Garland, the founder of BuySellAds, hopes that other networks will follow suit with their own asynchronous solutions, resulting in a faster internet.

If the major ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo! Network, AOL Advertising, as well as the popular ad serving products such as Google AdManager and OpenX converted their ad code to be non-blocking, the internet as a whole would become an order of magnitude faster. I genuinely hope that the larger ad networks will step up to the plate and follow our lead on this. A faster internet is a happier internet. This is a big deal.

I’m already using the new ad code here, as are many of the sites in the BuySellAds marketplace.