SpottedWalrus

The past 4 days were spent in Austin, TX at this years SXSWi Festival.

I met lots of new people and was able to finally meet in person many people I’ve conversed with over the past few years.

Overall the experience was a good one. There were a number of really good panels, though I do have to say that I was a bit let down by some of them. Seems a lot of the panels were good in theory but just weren’t executed well.

I would have liked a few more panels that weren’t on such a beginner level, but I understand a huge number of people that go to SXSW are really knew to this stuff.

Twitter remarkably withstood the onslaught of constant updates from thousands of attendees and was used for just about all communication between people getting together during the day and for parties in the evenings.

It’s good to be home and hit the ground running with some renewed energy about things and if I met you this year, it was a pleasure.

We’ve just launched Adregate.

Go sign up for a free account…assuming you need to manage ads.

I no longer need the 6 licenses for Mint that I own…so I’m selling them.

If you’d like a license, send me an email (josh at joshpigford dot com). I’m selling them for $20 each…they’re $30 “brand new”.

As Adregate is getting super close to launching I started thinking about the road it has taken to get here.

I initially came up with the name “adregate” for “aggregating” ad statistics. So it would have basically been a place to crunch numbers from all the ad networks you were using. That never really go off the ground but I had the domain name sitting around for safe keeping.

Then about 2 years ago I was getting really frustrated with the ad management solutions that were out there. Everything was just way too complex. All the extra crap in these other ad management apps just annoyed me.

I also knew I wanted to do a hosted solution. One barrier to entry for a lot of people has been the need to install things on their own server. So I wanted that problem solved as well.

The entire development process for Adregate has certainly been a learning experience. There have certainly been times where I just didn’t want to code anymore and frankly was just sick of the idea. There was a period of about 3-5 months where nothing was touched with Adregate. Developers moved on. Programming languages were changed. Tens of thousands of lines of code were scrapped because foundations and standards weren’t set right from the start.

I’m definitely a perfectionist and it’s taken a while to grasp the idea of not making things “perfect”, per se, but just getting something out there as a start. I can hack away at things all day long but it won’t necessarily make the product any better.

So right now I’ve set a tentative launch date for Adregate of February 5, 2008. The last 10% of things that take 90% of the time are all finally coming together and I really believe Adregate is going to fill a massive gap in the market.

I’m excited to see where things go with the app hope to see some of you using it.

If you run ads or want to manage ads on your site, Adregate could be the thing for you.

I’ve been building Adregate for a while now and it’s finally all coming together. We’ve been in private alpha for a couple of weeks now and will start sending out private beta invitations every few days soon.

Check out a few screenshots of things here.

So this past weekend I launched a new site called Decomodo (pronounced however you feel like).

It’s my little plot of intarweb real estate for me to post all the randomly sweetness stuff I come across day-to-day.

Basically, it’s the most awesome site you’ll ever see. Period.

Go visit Decomodo right now…or else!

So for about 2 weeks now I’ve been exchanging emails with Google AdWords support trying to figure out why my ads weren’t running at all. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. No impressions. No clicks. Absolutely nothing.

Now, when I say “exchanging emails” I mean Google AdWords support sent 7 emails in 2 weeks all saying the exact same thing. That the ticket has been escalated to the “technical team” and they’ll get back to me in 2-3 days. So every 2-3 days they got back to me with the same email. Awesome.

Well apparently after escalating my ticket 7 times, the guy with some brains got a hold of it and got my account working again.

So…why was my account not running ads for 2 weeks?

“Your ad previously wasn’t running due to a known technical issue.”

Ah. Okay. THAT technical issue. The one where AdWords just doesn’t do it’s job and show any ads. Fantastic. Might wanna check in to that guys.

/end rant

I’ve got quite a collection of web design and development books covering every topic from typography to color to XHTML/CSS and every development language imaginable. I’ve even got 3-4 books on the same topic for some things. But over the past year or so I’ve found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the books that have been coming on on various web topics lately.

It’s not so much that the contents of these books is irrelevant or badly written. What I’ve found myself thinking every time I crack open any of these books at Barnes & Noble is that I say to myself, “I could just find this online.”

So this got me thinking. Where will books, more specifically “web related” books, be in the next 5-10 years? The 37signals Getting Real book distributed as a PDF was a massive success and more authors seem to be going that route.

And even more than just “digital” books…will there really even be a direct need for entire books on topics? Practically ever bit of technical info you could possibly need is a simple search away.

Do you prefer books over searching online? Or the other way? And why?

With the announcement of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 coming out within the next month, do you think you’ll be upgrading?

After getting a taste of the new Photoshop CS3 interface…I don’t see how I couldn’t. It’s just too nice.

As of now I’m planning on upgrading to CS3 Design Premium. You? Your thoughts?

For those of you looking to get into the ad game, here are some of the top ad networks you can be a part of. Note that these are based off of my personal experience over the years. The amount of traffic your site gets as well as the quality of your content will strongly affect your rates.

Tribal Fusion - My average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) with these guys has always been higher than the other ad networks. I’ve had a few targeted campaigns for my sites, but not enough to be a deciding factor. They have a notoriously clunky interface that’s reported to be getting a face lift in the coming months. Despite the bad UI, the quality of their ads tends to be on the higher end with fewer of the flashing “You’ve just won a DVD player! Now forfeit your soul!” ads. They require a minimum of 2,000 unique visitors per day for most categories, though some more saturated categories can be as high as 10,000-20,000.

ValueClick Media - Formerly known as Fastclick, ValueClick Media has one of the best user interfaces in the business. Extremely easy to use. They accept just about any site with traffic…and I’m not really suggesting that as a good thing. I’d say a solid half of their ad fill is of the “annoying” genre. But despite some of their ads being lower quality, there are still quite a few good ads available and they’re definitely at the top of my list.

BurstMedia - BurstMedia (or rather their interface) has become known as one of the worst ad management interfaces in all the advertising world. It’s just plain spine cringing. They’ve been lowered to one of my bottom tier networks in my line up of ads solely based on how horrid their interface is. If they were at the top of my tier I’d have to spend time in the interface filtering out ads I don’t want…and that would put me in a bad mood. But interface aside, they are one of the few ad networks that can really hook you up with some killer targeted campaigns. I’ve had some campaigns with them with CPM’s in the $20-30 range…so I can’t complain about that. If you can withstand the horrible interface, these guys have some quality ads running.

Casale Media - Casale has only been a major player in the network game for a couple of years now, but they gained quite a bit of popularity at launch because their user interface is so easy to use. It was (and still is) compared a good bit to the network formerly known as Fastclick (now ValueClick Media). Unfortunately their wonderfully easy interface is plagued by low paying, flashy “You’ve just won 97 DVD players!” and a large number risque ads.

And there we have it! I know, I know…”What about AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network?” Well I purposely left them out. I don’t really consider them “ad networks” mainly because the user has much less control over what advertisers end up on their site. It’s more like “Here’s a code snippet to drop in your site, we’ll show you the advertisers that pay us the most money.” I personally prefer to have control over what end up on my site down to the pixel…so I’ll leave the contextual ad networks out of the game for this post.

Another thing you might have noticed is my harping on the user interfaces of each ad network pretty heavily. I didn’t do it only because user interface design happens to be a passion of mine, but more to say that a good user interface can go an extremely long way. Take Casale for instance, their ads are 99% bile, but I still use them because it’s extremely easy to filter out that 99% and use the 1% to put some quality advertisements on my sites. On higher traffic sites, that 1% really can be a signifcant amount.

What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. These types of ads are generally impression-based and are rarely content targeted. Think of these types of ads as being more like the billboards you see driving down the highway. They’re much less targetted but ultimately reach more people and have the potential make a a large amount of money.

In a future post I’ll cover a much wider spectrum of ad opportunities…especially some that could work better for the average blogger.