As I beleive eveyone knows, our ad network closes today. Please remove the code from your blogs , but do watch this space. I dont/cant make promises, but i really believe we had something with the Partners program and that with a little tweaking, and the right kind of partnership, we could make this profitable for publishers and us, right out of the gate.

If you want to talk to me about that, email performancing@gmail.com

• Final Publisher payments and commissions have been made.
• Advertiser refunds are in progress.
• Please dont contact me about either for at 48hrs but if you do suspect an error, or need help, email performancing@gmail.com early next week. Thanks!

Im sorry it came to this guys, next time we do something, we'll get it right :)

I'm sad to tell you that Partners has to close. While I have every faith it could have worked, it wasn't going to happen fast enough. Without more money invested it wasn't going to happen at all.

Any ads currently in the system will continue to run until the end of the month at which time the ad code will stop working. Please take your ad code down from your templates then. Remaining ad time will of course be refunded.

This news is surely not going to be popular. All I can say is thank you to all the publishers and advertisers who tried the service and to all the people in the forums who provided feedback and ideas. I am gutted I couldn't have some time to act on your suggestions.

I have been thinking a fair bit about what I want to do with the Partners advertising, what is working and what could do with improving. The ease which people can sign up and advertise seems ok but I would like to simplify things somewhat further, I think the main thing will be have the ads just image based, see more on that in a second. From the publisher side there are still many publishers without paid ads.

I'm looking at the following options (which are not necessarily exclusive)

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publishers in the soon to be renamed Performancing Partners blog ad network will be pleased to know that payments went out without hitch this month :)

After the fiasco last month with PayPal they'd bloody well better have done eh?

Happy new year everyone!

No doubt many of you will have heard the good news that PayPerPost have agreed to aquire certain parts of Performancing.

There appears to be some small confusion over what parts of Performancing the guys at PayPerPost have agreed to aquire, so aswell as posting this on my personal blog, i'll reiterate here so that everyone is as clear as can be.

This does not include the Partners ad network, and does not include PFF, our free blog editor for firefox. Details will go out shortly, but the bottom line is that we'll be moving those parts of Performancing to new domains and new brands.

We're all very excited about the deal. It gives Metrics a chance to truly flourish, and the community an opportunity to grow and continue to discuss the business of blogging.

Clearly there's a ton of stuff to do to make this all go smoothly, so do excuse me while i rush around like a madman trying to do it all in time....

Of all the features of the partners blog ad network, Auto pricing, the mechanism we use to determine a blogs monthly charge for advertisers, seems to cause the most contraversy and support posts in the forums.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, but I would like to find out your opinions on it as Im rather inclined to do away with it and set a flat rate for every blog unless the blog owner edits it to suit themselves.

Let me know what you think. The decision hasn't been made so if it's important to you, take a moment to influence it by sharing your opinion...

The recent CPA beta test we ran across the Partners network is now over. It was a great success in terms of it's purpose: To determine if CPA ads as backfill for unsold ad space was a viable option for publishers.

The answer is YES.

There were many lessons learned in this brief test, cheif among them being that targeting needs to be sharper, and we're very appreciative of our publishers help in both testing the ads, and providing awesome feedback.

With that feedback, and the knowledge gained from running the test, we'll be looking to run phase 2 shortly -- it may not be what you think, but it will be interesting, and hopfully lead to a more rewarding program for publishers.

Those that have earnt money from the test will be notified on the next payment run.

Thanks again everyone, I hope to have a similarly productive conversation with the next phase of testing as we strive to make Partners work for as many publishers as possible!

We've just finished inputing the promised first round of CPA (cost per action) ads into the beta "Network Ads" program to backfill unsold ad space across the Partners network.

Right now they are very broad in topic, as this is simply a test (but a test with the aim of making you money..), but presuming all goes to plan, we'll roll out more creatives and more specific targeting in coming days.

The ads are geo targeted, so if you're outside of the US, you may not see too much, but visitors in the US will see ads targeted to them. Again this is something we hope to work on if the beta test goes good.

I have to pop out, but do leave your comments and i'll answer any questions when i get back in a few hours.

I just came across Sole Redemption, and from there found Kicksaholic. The former is clearly influenced by the latter (or could it be the other way round?) but both blogs are great examples of the "niche blog", and man, you've just gotta love that clever Adsense implementation at the top eh?

Sole Redemption has just joined the Partners network, Kicksaholic is not yet with us -- hopefully they'll check their referals and stop by though, it's these kinds of sites that will eventually attract long term advertising partners.

As reported by Darren over at Problogger, we're to beta "Network Ads" next week. This is to address the challenges many publishers face in securing those all important first paid ads.

Network Ads are very simple. They're CPA (cost per action) ads that fill your unsold ad space untill a regular advertiser wants that space for herself. Initially the creatives will be limited to around a dozen fairly "universal fit" brands/products to test the system, and help us fine-tune targeting for categories, and in some cases individual blogs in the Partners network.

How they work

• Network Ads will appear on your site in place of "empty slots", but below paid slots.
• Network Ads are CPA - Cost Per Action. This means that you get paid if a reader clicks through on the ad, then buys something from the destination site
• Much greater detail on creatives and payouts will be available next week at launch.
• Payout is the same as for regular ads. A simple 70/30 split between publisher and Performancing.
• Initially, ads will be "universal fit" so that we can run the brief test across the entire network -- we've chosen the best performaning ads, but more accurate targeting will come in the next beta phase.
• Again, initially, features will be very limited. We want to collate some data first to help us determine what kind of features we need to put in place ot help our publishers profit from this. Please bear with us for a few days...
• There is no guarantee you will earn money. If your site is very low traffic for example, this may not work well for you. All the normal traffic building tips you can find here and at Problogger.net and other sites apply :)

How to opt-out

If you really don't want to participate, then we'll be sorry to hear that, but have provided an easy means for you to opt-out of the system entirely -- Just go to "my blogs" and edit your blogs to say no to network ads.

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Though I've no doubt there will still be some work to do (see below if you have not received payment..), payments finally went out last night to those of you still missing November cheques.

My sincere apologies for the delay. We had some 'paypal issues' that were out of our hands but appear to be finally resolved.

If you think you're missing your payment

First, please double check your emails (payments are made to the email account in your performancing profile). If you really think you're missing payment, then please comment here, or email support@performancing.com and let us know and we'll giet it fixed for you today.

On a happier note...

Im pleased to say this was our biggest payout to date, good job guys, and good luck for December!

Just to keep all our partners in the loop, our difficulties with PayPal are nearly resolved. We're not quite there yet, but we've been working at fixing the issue with them, and ensuring it doesnt happen again.

Bear with us just a little longer, and payments will go out very soon.

My apologies to those whose payments have been delayed.

Many of us don't have killer Photoshop skills. We have been hearing from Partners Advertisers that they need an easy way to put an ad together without having to hire a designer, with an emphasis on "ease" and "speed". Taking this feedback on board we have built a new system for Performancing Partners; "Easy Ads".

The launch of Easy Ads also marks the official opening of Performancing Partners to advertisers. We've been open to publishers for a couple of weeks, and have even been taking orders from advanced advertisers, but now we feel we've got all the advertiser features and tools in place and are ready to start pushing that side Partners.

Easy Ads has one mission, and that is to create a text based graphic to draw attention and click throughs. Because of this simple goal there is just enough flexibility to do that, and only that. While there are considerable branding benefits possible with graphical ads (and it's always been possible to upload 125x125 ads on the system), what you are aiming for is to get attention enough that the visitor will roll over the ad, see the hover box and click.

To create an ad you simply type your text in the first box and use the formatting tools just like a word processor or PFF, setting the colours, alignment, border, font and font size. The live preview will show you exactly what the finished product will look like. When you are happy you can move on to the next screen where you choose your rollover text and destination URL, etc.

As a first stab at this we think it works pretty well. Feedback from beta testers was positive but of course we need to know what advertisers make of it. It is after all there to be useful! Please do take it for a test drive and tell us what you think?

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Based on discussion with publishers in the Partners blog advertising network we've now made the emails you receive each time auto pricing updates your blog strictly opt-in

We called this one all wrong. We figured people would want to know, and wouldnt mind getting emails a few times a week (putting the fact that the system went a bit mental and was sending out double notifications each time to one side just for a moment heh...) but it turns out to be quite the opposite.

So, we've turned it around. Completely.

How to Enable Notifications

If you really want to be notified each time your blogs price updates, then simply follow the 'options' tab in the publishers section and check the box that says "Receive auto price email updates".

We'll almost certainly ad more options to that page as time goes by, and will of course let you know here on the PP blog.

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Added: We now have enough beta testers so no more beta testers are being accepted. Thanks!

We're looking to launch a new feature for advertisers next week, and I was hoping we might get a few Performancing guys to beta test it before we launch. If you're interested in trying out the new service, you dont have to be an advertiser, just a member of Performancing.

We've been working hard on a way to allow people to create simple text ads instead of having to upload a created 125x125px ad - not a real text ad, but a created image. It needs some testing as we need to make sure there are no platform dependency bugs before it's made available generally.

How to Help

Please comment here, or send me a private message and I'll add you to the group, and will email you to let you know what to do.

Thanks everyone

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