Announcing the Community Traffic Exchange

For those of you who have not yet registered with Adroll, here is the most recent email sent out to our publishers.  This was to let everyone know about the free traffic exchange we released which provides additional value for publishers participating in communities on Adroll.  Here it is:

Ready to get more traffic to your site or blog? We’re giving it to you. For free.

Thanks to feedback from some of our most active community members, Adroll now offers a traffic exchange for Ad Community participants. We’ll even set it up for you if you reply to this email with “Gimme free traffic” as the body of the email. If you’d rather handle it yourself, it’s easy to adjust your settings, as you’ll read below.

The way the Community Traffic Exchange works is simple: sites in your community show ads for you on their sites, and you show ads promoting other sites on yours. You can get detailed info on your Community Traffic Exchange here, http://www.adroll.com/about/trafficexchange. Here are the basics:

• Get free traffic from other sites in your community

• No work required, Adroll automatically builds a custom ad for you. See it on your My Ads tab.

• Only show relevant ads from your community

• Participate in multiple communities to get more traffic

• Get as many impressions as you give

• Switch off “Community Traffic Exchange” at any time

• See the results in your publisher reporting: impressions given, impressions received, and clicks received.

You can start participating now (or just try it out) using the “My Ad Spaces” tab in your profile, and see the ad for your site on your “My Ads” tab.

Adroll.com gives you an easy way to earn more together with related publishers, by helping you connect into larger niche communities that relevant advertisers want to buy. Now the Community Traffic Exchange provides another way to make your connections valuable. As always, if you have any questions, shoot an email to info@adroll.com.

Keep it rollin’,
Adam

Adam Berke
Adroll.com

Community Update #2

This was another email sent out to all registered users.  Once again, we thought it would be useful to share with a broader audience here on ye olde blog. 

Great news, we’re open! And we’re growing!

You got in early and helped pioneer Ad Communities. Some of you are already making more by actively marketing your communities, but now we’ve also made it easier for you to be discovered.

How? Well, at www.adroll.com you’ll see we added the following features (if you haven’t already):

• Links from your ad space now go directly to your Public Profile
• Other publishers can connect with you using your Public Profile
• The marketplace is open, so advertisers can buy
• Any advertiser can buy on your website using Adroll – no registration required
• Updated campaign tool permits geo-targeting on your site

We’ve listened to your feedback and made all these changes for you. Remember, Adroll.com gives you an easy way to earn more together with related publishers, by helping you connect into larger niche communities that relevant advertisers want to buy. We have hundreds of publishers live in the network, so come back to http://www.adroll.com to join a community that’s right for you, or invite other sites you know to get started. You can invite them from http://www.adroll.com/invite.

We have much more in store…so stay tuned. And remember to tell us what you think about these new features:

• Advertisers no longer have to register first to buy ad space from you. You can simply send advertisers a link to your Profile page, and they’ll be able to learn more about your audiences, and create a customized ad campaign. Just click “View my profile as others see it,” and send potential advertisers that URL.
• Those cute little “Managed by Adroll” links that hang out next to your ad space point interested users to your Profile page, giving you another simple selling opportunity.

There’s a ton of other new stuff that you can read about here http://www.adroll.com/about/products. Have a great week! And if you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to shoot them over to info@adroll.com.

Adam Berke

Community Update

Originally we sent this as an email to community members with profiles, but thought it would be worth sharing this info with a broader audience.

Hi all, this is Adam, VP of Community Development at Adroll.com. I hope you enjoy the first of our Community Updates. We’ll use these to keep everyone up to date on our progress, and highlight new features.

1. Private Beta Status

We announced the private beta exactly a month and a half ago, and we’re thrilled by the positive response we’ve gotten from publishers.

Many publishers have formed or joined ad communities, and advertisers are now buying across some of the more mature ad communities who’ve taken an active role in marketing themselves, like Surfing (http://www.adroll.com/surfing) and Alternative Music (http://www.adroll.com/altmusic).

Even publishers who have not yet had buying activity have given positive feedback on the free Adroll.com ad space manager to rotate other ad networks (including AdSense, Trbial Fusion), network optimizers (PubMatic, Rubicon Project), and for managing in-house ads. This is available to all publishers, so check it out by clicking “Manage” on your My Ad Spaces tab. 
 

2. New Features

Referral Program – Since our mission is to make your connections profitable, we are pleased to announce our referral program. This program rewards you for spreading the word about Adroll.com by inviting in new publishers and advertisers. For a full detailed description of the program, check out the new referral section of our site: http://www.adroll.com/referrals.

In short, we share back a portion of any earnings that we make from new publishers or advertisers that you invite to Adroll.com.

Publisher Demographics – We’ve made it possible to make your data available to advertisers so they can find the audiences they want, and buy your ad space. Reporting your demographics to advertisers takes 2 minutes – just move around a few sliders about your visitors’ average ages, gender, education and click save. If you don’t know something, you don’t have to put anything down. Sharing this data adds value for potential advertisers, and helps other publishers connect with you. 

Visit http://www.adroll.com/home, and click on “Add site demographics” from your “to do” list. It doesn’t need to be perfect – a general idea is better than no idea. Of course, your self reported demographic data is only one of many features we’re rolling out (pun intended) to help you demonstrate the value of your inventory. Stay tuned!

3. Tips and suggestions: Ad Network Rotation

Why just use one ad network when you can try out several? Adroll.com makes it easy for you to try out that snazzy new blog-widget-hybrid-ppc-2.0 ad network you’ve wanted to check out, without having to swap out the code on your site, or dedicating all your traffic at once. Just go to your profile’s “My Ad Spaces” tab, click “Manage”, and then click “Add Ad Network.” Rotating ad networks using Adroll.com ensures that you keep earning while you build and join the ad communities that’ll bring in the real upside earnings.

Also, for sites that see a lot of repeat traffic, simply rotating several ad networks can actually boost performance across all of them because you avoid showing a user the same thing every time.

Community Participation – Of course the best way to add value to your inventory using Adroll is by forming and participating in ad communities.

Ad communities allow advertisers to reach a broad range of sites that make up their desired audience. First, take a look at the communities that already exist: http://www.adroll.com/explore/featuredcommunities.  If your audience of Fashionistas, Art critics, Photographers, or whatever it might be, isn’t well represented, just go to your profile, click on your My Communities tab, and click “create community.”

Alright, that’s all for now. I hope you found at least one useful bit in here.

Please be in touch if you have any thoughts or questions by dropping an email to info@adroll.com .

Adam Berke

Site is up. Details on invitations.

The Welcome page at Adroll.com is now up, so you can learn more about what we’re doing there… We hope you’ll participate either as a publisher or an advertiser. For new registrants who come to sign up at Adroll.com during our private beta, your account will be reviewed within 24 hours. Once approved, you’ll have access to the site, and our service.

For new members who are invited into Adroll.com by an existing member, you’ll be automatically approved. You’re able to create your profile, obtain ad code, and begin selling/buying/connecting/rolling immediately after your site shows up in the marketplace.

It is time…

Well, this has been an outstanding week. We’ve demo-ed the product at ad:tech in New York, and at BlogWorld in Vegas – and people got it. So today, we are taking our alpha into private beta and introducing Ad Communities.

What are Ad Communities…

Ad Communities are a way for small and medium sized publishers to package and sell ad space using a breakthrough ad server and a “social network”-like matching system. Adroll.com connects online publishers and allows them to aggregate (or “roll-up”) their ad space, making it possible for advertisers to access hard to reach niches in a cost-effective manner, and discover highly targeted audiences across related sites. In our system, each “connection” between publishers selectively unites their ad spaces.

Adroll.com lets online publishers sell their ad space independently, or band together with other similar publishers to form these “ad communities.” So, each “ad community” is a publisher-assembled, publisher-controlled, ad network.

By working together, our publishers sell more of their own inventory at higher CPMs – and earn more because it’s sold direct. Advertisers get targeted audiences, and efficiency when buying on “long tail” and “fat middle” web sites.

We’ll describe how it works soon, and devote a separate post to it…

For now, we’re psyched to announce we’re rolling.

We’ve been running quietly in private alpha (for the last few months) and we’ve served sites large and small. The reception to private alpha of the Adroll.com platform from our publishers has been great, and we’re proud to say that every site that has come on board, has stayed on board.

There’s a lot more to say so we’ll post more news soon…

“Advertisers have two challenges…”

“Advertisers have two challenges; first, they need to find vehicles that are appropriate to their task and, second, find an efficient way to transact with them. For brand advertisers (who typically define success by lift in metrics like awareness, message association, brand favorability, purchase intent), finding blogs that have real equity with their readerships is first and foremost. Second, and frankly more challenging, is finding a way to transact with these people. There are challenges to validating audience on small sites given the current market for ad research, finding professional counterparts at these publishers with which to engage and frankly getting enough scale (reach) to make it worth their time, agency transaction costs being what they are.”

– Christopher Batty, VP Sales, Gawker Media

Ok, it’s about time. Let’s roll.

We’ve been working hard for a while now. We’ve kept quiet. Heads down. In the next few days, we’ll start sharing our ideas, talking openly about what we’ve been doing in our small office – about insights we’ve gained from smart publishers and advertisers, and what inspires the late nights, lost wages and thrill to show up every day… Hopefully you’ll tell us where to from here.

Congrats to AdECN! And why this matters to publishers…

Congrats to the team at AdECN. At AdTech SF there was a ton of talk on online ad exchanges. Unsurprisingly, Right Media was taken down by Yahoo shortly afterwards, at a -ahem- healthy multiple, then industry talk quieted down…

Today Microsoft announced two deals; they’re taking over ad sales for Digg (mahalo!), and they’re buying AdECN, the nasdaq-like exchange for publishers and ad network members. The exchange is a natural fit for Microsoft, and this deal makes sense given AdECN’s open, network-friendly model. Hope this holds under new ownership.

In light of Redmond’s other news, oddly the professional bloggers I read regularly haven’t covered this in depth yet: who’s got an ad exchange now: Google (DoubleClick), Yahoo (Right Media), Microsoft (AdECN), oh and AOL (ad.com). Long-term contracts are getting slotted too: Google (MySpace, Fotolog), Microsoft (Facebook, Digg), Yahoo (themselves). Besides ad serving being a rough spot, sure seems like exchanges just swept the big sites. So what’s the news for everyone else: “who you gonna pick?”

Google takes DoubleClick in deal worth $3.1B

This is covered sufficiently by others. New York Times coverage of Google’s Acquisition of DoubleClick is the best I’ve read from a major pub.

I made a bet (in September, just collected $50) that this was going to happen. It’ll be interesting to see if the deal gets through DOJ.  Once it does, if Google makes ad serving free I’ll take home another Grant. Bring it home to daddy.

Participated in The Lydian Roundtable

Over the weekend we had the chance to partcipate in The Lydian Roundtable, an open forum for discussion of trends and innovation, mainly in the payment industry.

Many thanks to Dick, David and especially Karen from Market Platform Dynamics. While MPD historically has been a consulting company focused on payments, it’s clear that their thinking is applicable to other ‘network oriented’ businesses.

My panel was called “Sleeping Giants and Wildcards” and included Alyssa Cutwright (VP, PayPal), Jason Hogg (CEO, GratisCard), Mark Lavelle (VP, I4Commerce/Bill Me Later), Marwan Forzley (Secure eBill), and Ben Ling (Google Checkout). I was supposed to moderate, but kept slipping into “speaking” role. Whoops.

Couldn’t say much about what we’re doing in advertising… so I didn’t contribute much useful insight on the panel. But some side conversations were productive. 2 companies to watch in the next 9 months: Yodelee and CapitalOne.