I love contests and competitions as a way of bringing in readers, links and in this case comments to brand new blogs 451 Press have a bunch of new blogs going out and Chrispian Burks was nice enough to ask me if it was ok to post that thread in the forums — absolutey! More details on the 451 press site.
Blog
December Payments Sent
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!
Performancing Member Issues Answered
Ted over at PayPerPost has been answering questions from the Performancing community in a recent blog post. If you have questions or comments do pop over and jump into the comments…
Scribefire
As most of you know, Performancing Firefox, our free blog editor for Firefox, will be rebranded, and relaunched under a new name in 2007.
That name is Scribefire.
With well over 400k downloads on Mozilla alone, Scribefire is an awesome project, and one I take particular pride in, having been privilged to shape it’s development over the last year.
We’re looking for developers and designers to join the new project, so if you think it would interest/benefit you to be involved, please email me at [email protected]
thanks everyone, and happy new year!
Performancing and PayPerPost
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….
Your thoughts on Auto Pricing
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…
Partners CPA Test Now Finished
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!
Partners Network CPA Ads are Online!
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.