MediaWhiz Blog: Archive

eBay has fixed there reporting glitches and we are good to go.

As of a several days ago, an eBay reporting delay is having an effect on AuctionAds reporting. Reports from 6/27 to 6/29 may not be complete. Rest assured that as soon as we can receive all the data from eBay, these days will be updated.

Thanks for your patience.

AuctionAds, a division of MediaWhiz Holdings Inc., today announced it received the eBay Star Developer Award for “Most Innovative Application-Buyer” at the sixth annual eBay Developers Conference. AuctionAds (www.auctionads.com) enables users to monetize their website by displaying live eBay auctions next to their related copy.

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“We are honored to accept this prestigious award, which recognizes that AuctionAds is a successful tool for leveraging the lucrative eBay affiliate system, in a way that is easy for publishers to use,” stated AuctionAds CTO David Dellanave.

“The eBay Star Developers Awards recognize developers for their innovation and commitment to the eBay platform,” said Max Mancini, senior director of disruptive innovation at eBay. “AuctionAds was awarded for its efficiency using innovative caching techniques, allowing it to serve up 30 million impressions a month with only 200,000 API calls, an impressive volume of traffic per API call.”

The eBay Developers Conference in Boston brings together more than 500 third-party developers, entrepreneurs and affiliates to meet with technologists and business leaders from eBay, PayPal, ProStores, Shopping.com and Skype.

Last week at eBay Devcon, CTO David Dellanave and CEO Jeremy Schoemaker, were presented the eBay Star Developer Award.

You can see the interview with the company founders here:

We have seen many AuctionAds publishers removing borders from our AuctionAds ad units, mimicking the popular Google AdSense optimization feature of removing borders to blend the ads within a site better.

Did you know that leaving the borders turned on might actually lead to a higher click through rather than a lower one? With our AuctionAds showing an image along with the text part of the ads, using borders can help define them, as well as help visitors quickly tell which picture goes with which text description.

Not sure which version if the best one for you? If you have an ad serving system, such as phpAdsNew, set up two channels in your AuctionAds account, and create two variations of your ad unit, one with borders and the other blended. Rotate them 50/50 for a couple of days and see which ad unit style has the highest CTR - is it the one with borders or without? Then chose that one as your standard ad unit style throughout the site. You can also use this to test out colors as well.

Don’t have an ad serving system on your site? You can do a quick and dirty version of the same by manually swapping the styles each day, and after swapping for a few, see which has the highest CTR. This won’t be as accurate, since daily variations in traffic can affect your stats, but it is a way to workaround if you cannot use an adserver.

If you do your own ad unit style testing, be sure to report back the findings of your testing, being sure to include the ad unit size and whether borders or blended was the best for you.

If you find that the AuctionAd auctions that are displaying for you in your ad units are showing exactly the right keywords, but not precisely the auctions you are wanting to see, try optimizing your ad units by specifying a minimum or a maximum bid price. In other words, you can tell AuctionAds to only show ads that have bids higher than a certain amount, or below a certain amount, rather than the potential to show all ads for those keywords regardless of the current bid price.

Lets say you have a site about Playstation 3. Now, your site attracts a lot of traffic, but you already know about 95% of your visitors already own that coveted PS3. So it makes more sense to show ads related to PS3 games, accessories and add-ons, rather than the PS3 console. So rather than try using various keyword variations to try and trigger ads for related PS3 items, while not the console itself, you can include a “maxprice:100″ in your AuctionAds javascript, and it will only show items with a bid price of $100 or less.

Now, as you use this, you could see some PS3 consoles slipping through, but this would only be if the bid price is lower than $100 at the time. And you can adjust the maxprice accordingly to the bid prices you see on eBay. But this can definitely increase the interest in your ads when you are showing more things related to the PS3, while not the PS3 itself.

Likewise, you can also use the “minprice:100″. If you have a review site on the PS3, including the console, it would make sense to use that tag on pages about the PS3 system for people who are considering buying one.

To use the “minprice:___” or the “maxprice:___” feature, simply include it as a keyword in your AuctionAds keyword tag, being sure to change the ___ to the USD bid price.

Just be careful not to go crazy with this feature unless you have reason to. Using maxprice and minprice will reduce the number of available auctions the AuctionAds ad units will display, so make sure you aren’t going crazy or you just might find there are no auctions appearing in your ad units because you have narrowed it down too much!

In case you missed the progress report on AuctionAds it is doing VERY well.  It is outperforming Adsense on many websites and growing fast because it is making publishers money.  Ebay recently honored AuctionAds and in particular David Dellanave and Jeremy Schoemaker with the "eBay Most Innovative Application-Buyer" award.  This was one of Ebay’s Star Developer Awards given out at their annual developer’s conference.  Hats off to both these guys and in particular to Dave on the tech side for creating a piece of technology that is amazingly scalable. 

Has anyone tried to be a decent domain name recently?  One thing I have noticed is the moment you express interest in a domain the price instantly goes up 500% from where it should be priced. Case in point: working on a top secret new project here.  I like two names for the project:  www.Ballyhoo.com and www.BlogBuzz.com

So if you are like me you are thinking maybe $10k on these and go up to $20k if I am in a good mood.  Wrong.  So two months ago I approach Ballyhoo.com and offer $10k looking to take it down fast.  No dice.  The owner wants $100k and wont budge so I go over to BlogBuzz.com and offer $10k.  Owner thinks about it and says he will do a deal for $20k.  I am not sold on BlogBuzz.com and really wanted Ballyhoo.com so I put the deal on ice for two months with plans to go back to Ballyhoo.com  I go back this week and no change on price, $100k.  So I go back to Blogbuzz.com going to hard ball him down from $20k and see how close I can get to $10k.  Guess what, in the last month he has got all sorts of calls and offers, new price is…. $100k with no negotiating.

Now I have high hopes for our new project but going $100k in the hole on a domain before the launch didn’t make it into the business plan so I am back to square one.  I could blame Business2.0 for bringing domaining mainstream but instead I blame Mr. Hagans and Mr. Provost for hyping domaining to seos.  Have you also seen a recent spike in domain prices?

Update: purchased Hyped.com for this project.  Price was a fraction of $100k, just don’t tell Hyped it was our third choice

Ever wondered what kind of cool USB devices there actually are that go beyond the standard wireless mouse or USB phone charger? Wonder no more, because they can all be found at the site of the AuctionAds publisher of the month, GetUSB.info.

Greg Morris started a USB website because he was already hunting down new USB products daily, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to begin turning those findings into a popular USB product blog. What started as an online experiment to better educate himself on blogging and internet turned into a profitable experience too.

Greg started the site back in January 2006, and has used programs such as Google AdSense, Commission Junction, BlogAds, Chitika, among others, and found that USB ads just weren’t paying enough… especially Google AdSense ads, which were low in per click revenue. Greg added AuctionAds back in March, and found that because there is so much USB inventory at eBay, that “the commissions are much higher thus making AuctionAds the more profitable partner for generating revenue.”

“AuctionAds is currently my favorite advertising method. I believe it’s a combination of site content in conjunction with an excellent tool for generating ads. The beautiful thing about AuctionAds is the fresh content served up. You eliminate advertising blindness because what eBay serves up is A) consistently different with almost every page view and with B) different images, prices and descriptions. This is excellent because even with return visitors at GetUSB.info they always see something new for sale,” Greg says.

He has found that using four standard variations of USB combination keywords works best on the Wordpress-based site. “On each page there are four ads running of AuctionAds. Each ad uses different key words. The combination of the 4 different key words along with the different content served up from AuctionAds makes for a very fresh list of products on every page view. It’s great that AuctionAds gives the web-owner the tools to create custom Ads for each page yet at the same time developed a product powerful enough to work when standardized. I’ve also started paying more attention to upcoming events, holidays etc and use that to my advantage and edit some AuctionAds on a week by week basis.”

Thinking about starting your own blog? We asked Greg to give advice to others who are just starting out and looking for a way to make money through blogging. “There are many tips and tricks I’d like to give. The most important is being consistent and posting on a regular basis - but everyone says that (although it’s true). Let me give you a tid-bit which isn’t mentioned that often - but valuable. I find unique sites that present content in a unique way and read their blog just to learn their method on how to present information. From how they phrase things, to using the block quotes, to emphasizing a certain point by incorporating off beat links/events to drive a point home. Very few bloggers/webmasters are training or educated in writing so this is a good way to learn what works.”

Have you ever done a search for anything USB related? If you have, you have seen Greg’s tips in action, as chances are good you have stumbled across one of his GetUSB.info blog post in the process, as the site ranks on the first page for most searches related to USB gadgets it has featured on the GetUSB.info blog, including the USB Circus Cannon which is currently his favorite USB gadget of the moment, with foam darts he can fire around his office using laptop controls. So next time you are thinking of searching for anything USB or are looking for that quirky USB toy, think of GetUSB.info

Want to be the next AuctionAds Publisher Spotlight feature? Let us know!

When AuctionAds kicked off March 6th we had set pretty high expectations. The first goal was to have 1000 publishers by April. Then hopefully 10,000 publishers by the first of the year. Well, I am happy to report that it has grown so virally that we had to completely go back to the drawing board on our goals. Yesterday was the 3 month anniversary of the AuctionAds launch and the growth has been truly amazing. Here is a bandwidth shot from our switch just to give you some idea of our growth over the last 3 months since launch:

So as of right now we have 17,138 partners.

The one thing we pledge at AuctionAds is to never settle for success. We will continue to always listen to feedback from our publishers and make new features available. Thanks for a great first 3 months!