I want to thank everyone that has applied to the beta. We hired a temporary designer to help with the comping process and today we are sending the first batch of people code to run the YieldBuild service.
Next week, we should be much faster at turning around the requests and we are working hard on a self-service tool. Thanks again for applying to the beta and your patience as we improve our processes to serve you more quickly.
This has been a busy week for all of us working on YieldBuild. We’ve had over 600 publishers apply to the beta program and applications are still coming in more quickly than we can respond.
While we are hammering away on a self service solution, we are looking for some temporary design help to create mock-ups for all the new beta customers.
We need someone that will work from our office in San Francisco and who has their own computer and graphics software. If you’re interested, please send an email to James@Hubpages.com.
The folks at Google understand the importance of formatting and placing ads. Google is getting close to making a new tool for changing formatting options without having to go into pages and update the javascript. This is a good idea and something we developed at YieldBuild. We go much further, by just requiring a maximum height and width with the rest of the formatting optimization done from our custom algorithms. YieldBuild also supports placing many ad zones in the page so many more spots can be tested in combination to find the best performing layouts.
Sign up for the YieldBuild Beta.
Over the weekend Techcrunch wrote a piece on YieldBuild. The response has been fantastic. We are quickly working to get back to all the publishers that applied to our beta.
I had a little trouble responding to comments on the Techcrunch article because of Akismet flagging them as spam. Mike dug a few of them out, but there was one more question I wanted to answer.
What stops the publisher for using YB for training and figuring out the optimal layout and quitting YB after that?
YieldBuild is a service that is constantly working to find better layouts. After the initial training phase, YieldBuild will run several high yielding layouts that outperform the one best layout over time. Also, different types of users respond to ads differently. For example, someone that comes to a website in the morning from a search engine will have a different optimal layout than a person that directly navigates to a site in the afternoon. YieldBuild automatically performs these types of optimizations.
Venture Beat reported a new network for AdSense ads on Facebook today. They claim the ads can be purchased to only target Facebook. AdSense has had site targeted ads for some time, so we aren’t sure what’s different about these ads, since they appear contextually relevant to each application. Maybe Google is gearing up inventory for advertisers and will sell it soon.
But, we agree with Eric Schmidt’s comments about the number of pageviews generated by social networks. Therefore, it makes a ton of sense for AdSense to help publishers monetize their Facebook applications as well as other social networking sites.
The real problem facing social networking sites is monetization. Effective CPMs need to increase significantly. If AdSense can do this for Facebook apps, then it will be a big story.
Text ads, served by Microsoft were spotted on Digg yesterday. JenSense did a nice job of getting under the covers and pulling out the code. We also appreciate her comments about the formatting of the ads .
While we wouldn’t be too critical of the contextual matching, we do think that the formatting of the ads could certainly be improved. After all, that’s our business.
If you look at the code a little more closely, there appears to be only one formatting setting at this point for the ad size.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
dapMgr.enableACB(“top_ad_msft”, false);
dapMgr.renderAd(“top_ad_msft”, “&PG=DIG728&AP=1390″,
728, 90);
</script >
</div><div class=”permalink-wrap”><div id=”contents”>
<div id=”wrapper”>
<div class=”sidebar-short”><div id=”item_ad_msft”
class=”item_ad_image”>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
dapMgr.enableACB(“item_ad_msft”, false);
dapMgr.renderAd(“item_ad_msft”, “&PG=DIG300&AP=1089″,
300, 250);
</script >
We tried to get the ads to come up on Digg, but didn’t get any. It’s possible that they’re specifying the formatting server-side during provisioning which is then tied back to each ad via the location naming (“top_ad_msft”, “item_ad_msft”). This leaves the door open to more sophisticated formatting down the road. In some ways this may be a more future-proof approach.
In order to get a better sense of whether we are giving our friends at MSN too much credit, we sampled the link color in the screenshots on Jen’s blog. They don’t match, but that could be because they were saved as a gif, so the palette might have been changed from the original color. We’d need to see such an ad in the wild to be sure.
So at this point we’d tentatively agree with the assessment that no formatting is being applied to these ads other than size.
