Content Ads Guide

A month ago I anounced PubMatic. Today I can annouce the global launch of PubMatic beta. As you know, PubMatic has been running in alpha mode since August 16th. Since the launch of that version, over 400 publishers have implemented PubMatic and are using it to serve millions of ads per day. Publishers have seen revenue increases of up to 106%. PubMatic maintained 99.9% up time during this period. Based on these successes, PubMatic is now available globally to any publisher as a beta service.

Now that PubMatic is in beta, you can expect increased functionality. They have recently added support for BlueLithium ad network, and PubMatic now supports 3 of the 5 largest ad networks in the US. They improved both our auction and color optimization algorithms in order to drive even better revenue increases for their publishers. They also focused focused on strengthening the infrastructure to serve thousands of additional publishers. Of course, PubMatic continues to remain a free service while in beta.

They also published a sucess story, which is driving 90% revenue increase for Sportsvite (www.sportsvite.com). You can read more about how PubMatic and Sportsvite did this here: PubMatic sucess stories

The Associates program announced yesterday the worldwide launch of Amazon Widgets! These new widgets are small, visually dynamic, easily configurable widgets and allow you to feature products from Amazon on blogs, websites and social networking pages. In as little as one minute, you can populate a widget with your favorite Amazon products, your comments about those products, and select from a set of color and layout themes to match both your mood and website. From the music you are listening to, movies you’re watching, clothes you’re wearing, and even the food you are eating, with earth’s biggest selection of products Amazon widgets provide you unlimited options for voicing your tastes. The simple-to-use web interface for building and implementing a widget is at http://widgets.amazon.com, and can also be found through Associates Central.

You have the option to make money with our widgets by joining the Amazon Associates program. Just as with our existing tools, when a visitor to your site clicks on a product in your Amazon Widget and makes a purchase, you can earn up to 10 percent in referral fees from Amazon. With the exception of the Amazon Unbox Video Previewer all of the widgets can also be used without joining the Associates program.

You can see some examples of these widgets on Associate’s blog.

As an AuctionAds publisher, I’m excited to announce some changes on AuctionAds.com website and ad blocks! They worked hard to improve their system’s performance and to add some new features and improvements, which are:

Microsoft announced the release of the Microsoft Content AdsBeta to all U.S. adCenter advertisers on August 29! With this release, you can choose to have your accounts upgraded to include contextual distribution. Adcenter Content Ads will display on Microsoft network website, including MSN Tech & Gadgets, Money, Real Estate, and Windows Marketplace, as well as partner websites.

Content Ads lets you choose how to manage your campaigns by offering these features:

• Distribution Control: Advertisers choose between Hybrid ad groups (run ads on both Live Search and content pages using Hybrid ad groups) or Content-Only and Search-Only ad groups (create a uniquedestination URL or have content-specific ad creative).

• Pricing Control: Content Ads uses the same bid structure as Search Ads. Advertisers can set different bid prices for content clicks by using the Advanced Bidding function at both ad group and keyword levels.

• Reporting Control: Advanced reporting features allow advertisers to see how their ads are performing, by distribution channel, so they can make adjustments.