AdOn Blog

AdOn Network Launches "AdOn Safeguard"

Harmful, malicious and/or inappropriate ads are a serious threat for all of us in the online advertising industry. At AdOn Network we are continuously working to find and develop better solutions to fight this problem to protect our publishers and their end users. With that in mind, we recently launched AdOn Safeguard designed to assist in detecting and preventing the appearance of malicious and inappropriate ads within our ad network.

The AdOn Safeguard service uses a proprietary technology solution to review the contents of ads that are hosted on external ad servers outside of the AdOn Network environment. AdOn Safeguard can detect Malware (software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system), ActiveX (or other executable software downloads) and Exit Pops (the launch of a secondary ad or browser window when the user leaves a website).

Once a harmful ad is detected, the system automatically shuts down the ad campaign associated with that ad and alerts an AdOn Network account representative for further investigation.

For more information about the AdOn Safeguard service, contact our Client Services Team.

Lost in Translation

(Article posted on MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider, by Kory Kredit)

What is the value of an established print media name? Let's take a simple test to find out. Which of these URLs do you recognize?

• www.desmoinesregister.com
• www.eastvalleytribune.com
• www.drudgereport.com
• www.perezhilton.com

For those of you who claim to recognize the first two, you are either lying, or you have lived in both Iowa and Arizona, as I have. While both the Des Moines Register and the East Valley Tribune are print newspaper companies that have been in existence for decades, you've probably never heard of them or visited their Web site unless you live in those metropolitan areas. Even if you do live in those regions, the chance that you've never visited one of these sites increases as your age bracket skews younger.

Ask any college-age or 20-something man or woman where they get their news/information/gossip, and he or she is increasingly likely to cite a pure-play Internet site like DrudgeReport.com, PerezHilton.com, a favorite news aggregation site or RSS feeds before listing a local print media outlet.

While national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are growing, local newspaper sites are loosing market share to pure-play Internet sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, as well as aggregation sites like newsvine.com and topix.net, as reported in a 2007 study from The Shorenstein Center at Harvard  University.

This raises a perplexing question for local newspapers, which are more and more reliant on their Web sites for advertising revenue to either supplement or replace decreasing revenues from their offline product. Does a traditional media brand name (i.e. Seattle Times, Kansas City Star, etc.) provide significant value to an online audience, or does its value get lost in translation somewhere between the printed word and the 19" flat-screen you're currently staring at? 

As circulation rates and ad revenues drop across the board in the newspaper industry (ad revenues in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006), the brand recognition of the local newspaper drops along with it. It has also proven increasingly ineffective to try to apply the traditional offline business model to an online news site.

Gone are the days when the local newspaper was the self-appointed guardian and exclusive voice of news and information for the masses. In traditional media, the journalist and the media outlet handed down the news to the public and that was typically where the story ended, with the exception of the filtered and approved-for-print Letter to the Editor that might follow in a day or two.

In the Internet age, news is now a "shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer, according to Jonah Peretti, founding partner of The Huffington Post. To be successful, Internet news and media require an ongoing conversation, multiple methods of engagement, the addition of user-generated content and a wide variety of opinions and views.

Today's savvy online consumers also want control over what they read. They want to customize their entire experience for their personal preference. Not only do they want to choose the stories that are relevant to them, they want to modify the layout of the site and the navigation to suit their needs, as they can on sites like newsvine.com, topix.net and netvibes.com.

In an effort to recapture some of their local readers on the Web, newspapers might consider abandoning their traditional print brand online, reinventing an entirely new media brand for the Web. This allows a great deal of autonomy to operate — much the same as an Internet company, not a newspaper company with a Web site.

The challenge that lies ahead is whether or not traditional newspaper companies can become agile enough to adapt to this new paradigm. Can they leverage their most important asset, which is their depth of news and information at the local level, and deliver it in a way that engages and interacts with readers, giving them more control over the experience?

Simply relying on their offline brand recognition to draw readers to their Web site will prove to be a losing strategy as readers continue to gravitate towards pure-play Internet sites that cater to the preference of an ever-savvier online audience.

Can newspapers adapt quickly enough to remain relevant — or are they doomed to become this century's version of the telegraph machine?

Overcoming The Unpleasant Stigma Of In-Text Ads

(This was posted on MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider)
by Kory Kredit

In the movie “Pleasantville,” there was a social stigma attached to anything that represented change, or that failed to measure up to a pre-defined idea of what was, well…pleasant. For the citizens of Pleasantville, pleasant meant roads that don’t go past the city limits, colors that don’t vary from the approved palette, and books with no controversial ideas.

If we fast-forward from that black and white Mayberry-like town set in the ’50s to our current online media culture, we see new stigmas developing just as quickly as we dismiss old ones. Such is the case with in-text advertising.

If we were to adapt the standard definition of a stigma to the online world, it might read something like this: The phenomenon whereby an Internet technology contains one or more attributes, which are deeply discredited by Internet users, and is thereby rejected as a result of those attributes.

So what are those attributes that Internet users and some publishers find such disdain for with regards to in-text advertising? I recently conducted an informal market research survey to gauge people’s attitudes towards in-text technology to find out what they liked and/or disliked about it.

It didn’t take long to discover that there was a predominantly negative stigma attached to in-text, and that there was one primary reason for the negative perception. More than any other attribute or feature, users and publishers are put off by the invasiveness of it-text ad technology. More specifically, they “hate” the fact that the ad automatically launches on a mouse-over (when their cursor moves over a highlighted word).

There were some additional issues that were common among the survey participants such as the lack of relevance of the ad or content in the in-text window, and the fact that it generally doesn’t provide much benefit to the end-user.

Changing Expectations

We’ve established that the negative stigma exists. Now the question becomes, “How do we reverse it?” The only way to overcome a negative stigma is to make a concerted ongoing effort to change expectations.

When you see a highlighted word with a double underline and an icon on a page, what’s your typical first reaction? For most people, you move your cursor to the far left or right side of the screen to avoid setting off all those in-text land mines embedded in the page. In some cases, however, moving your cursor to the side will unwittingly launch a series of flash ads that completely overtake the page or initiate a multimedia ad which blasts out an audio file as you race to find the volume icon on your desktop.

In order to change users’ expectations about in-text technology and remove the stigma that currently exists, there are two simple solutions to consider:

1. Change from mouse-over activation to click activation. The unwanted and unintentional launch of an ad from a mouse-over is the largest irritant for Web site visitors. By simply requiring the visitor to click on the link in order to launch the window, you overcome the largest hurdle for in-text acceptance. If visitors click on the link, it also indicates that they are intentionally searching for more information on that keyword, as opposed to accidentally launching a window because their mouse was in the wrong place.

2. Provide contextually relevant content in the in-text window. Some in-text products show the same ad or content regardless of what keyword it was launched from. While the repetition provides the advertiser value from a branding standpoint, the visitor begins to associate all in-text links with irrelevant ads. If in-text providers feature more relevant content and/or advertising, visitors would find value in the application and be more inclined to click on the link to view the content in the in-text window.
   

If in-text applications adopt these two features, the industry would go a long way towards changing visitors’ expectations and overall acceptance of in-text technology, removing the stigma that currently exists. Wouldn’t that be pleasant for those of us in the in-text industry?

For more information on an adding a contextually relevant customizable in-text solution for your website, go to JargonFish.com and register for free.

In-Textification Or In-Text Infestation?

This article was also published by MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider on December 13, 2007.

by Kory Kredit

Depending on whom you ask, the in-text ad is either an ingenious ad revenue-generation mechanism (an opinion typically shared by marketing and ad sales people), or pure unadulterated evil invented by Lucifer himself (popular opinion among journalists and editors). These two groups could be referred to as bottom-liners (not to be confused with bottom-feeders), and content purists (read: hopeless idealists).

The bottom-liner views the proliferation of in-text advertising, or in-textification, as a natural progression of the ad-supported Internet universe. In this world, Web sites exist to generate revenue, or at least that’s what their job description says. These people are generally responsible for squeezing every last penny out of any available pixel they can confiscate from their editors and/or Web site designers.

Content purists, alternately, see the growing threat of in-text advertising as an unwanted infestation that crosses the line between their sacred words and the necessary evil that is advertising. While they subconsciously acknowledge that advertising pays their bills, they long for an Internet utopia void of banners, interstitials, rollovers, adwords, pop-ups and the like. (If only Al Gore could have foreseen the dark side of his creation, would he have done it differently, knowing what he knows now?)

The common ground for both of these groups is that they understand and embrace the reality that one cannot exist without the other — or let’s at least pretend they do, just for the sake of argument. Without the bottom-line focus of marketing and ad sales people, the Internet would most likely be an overgrown college message board. By the same token, ads without compelling content wouldn’t draw eyeballs to visit a Web site (although that hasn’t stopped a large number of video-sharing sites from adopting that model).

The lure of in-text advertising for bottom-liners is that it essentially creates prime real estate that didn’t exist before. It offers a wonderful solution for Web sites that don’t have any more ad inventory to sell. This newfound treasure trove can be turned into additional ad inventory that doesn’t require any modifications to the layout of a page.

For the content purist, however, embedding ads into individual words in their articles can create an unwanted intrusion and a poor user experience for the reader.

This leads us to the issue at hand. Can in-text advertising provide additional ad revenue while not detracting from the user experience, or possibly even enhancing the user experience?

There are a number of companies like Yahoo, Snap, JargonFish and LingoSpot that have created a next generation of hybrid in-text applications that may offer an acceptable alternative that benefits the bottom-liner, the content purist and the Web site visitor.

This hybrid model displays related content from a variety of online resources (i.e. YouTube, flickr, IMDb, Wikipedia, Technorati…) along with a display or text ad. With this type of application, the ad unit is secondary to the content in the window. The added value of the related content provides the visitor with a compelling reason to click on the highlighted link and view the contents of the in-text window, including the ad.

The result is an in-text solution that could appease both the bottom-liners and the content purists. The ad unit generates revenue and the related content adds value to the overall user experience, or at least that is the intended goal.

While this solution may not completely bridge the gap between salespeople and journalists, maybe the two sides could view it as a small plot of common ground in the battle for Web page real estate. Sort of like the Switzerland of the Internet.

Transition Ads

As if adding graphic ads and graphic re-directs to our Pop-Under ads wasn't enough, we are adding another alternative ad type to our Pop-Under ads. Introducing Transition Ads!

A Transition Ad (also known as an interstitial ad) is an ad that is displayed to a consumer as they are navigating between pages on a publisher's Website. When a consumer clicks a link on a publisher's Website, your Transition Ad will be displayed as an intermediate page before the consumer reaches the next page on the publisher's Website.

Transition Ads are available in three different formats:

1. Landing Page Ad: You provide a URL for your Website or landing page to be displayed in a Transition Ad
2. Graphic Image Ad: You upload a graphic ad to be displayed in a Transition Ad
3. Graphic Redirect Ad: You provide JavaScript code or similar type of ad code to display an ad that you are hosting

To create a Transition Ad campaign, follow these steps:

1. Select the ‘Transition Ad’ option on the ‘Create a Campaign’ page:

2. Select the type of Transition Ad you want to create (Landing page, graphic image and graphic redirect):

If you have additional questions about Transition Ads, contact us:

866.258.9245

or email us:

Advertiser Sales (new advertisers)

Advertiser Services (existing advertisers)

Business Development (new publishers)

Client Services (existing publishers)

More Sizzle in Our Pops

The new Pops are here! The new Pops are here! While it may not be as exciting as getting the new phone book, you should be excited nonetheless.

We've launched a new version of our Pop-Under ads that enables you to upload graphic ads or graphic redirects for your Pop-Under campaigns. You still have the option to display your Website or landing page as a full-page Pop-Under, but now you have two additional options.

For the graphic Pop-Unders, you can upload a 720x300 GIF or JPG. The Graphic redirect option allows you to enter your redirect ad code (includes javascript code) which will display an ad that you are hosting.

Pop-Under Ad Resources:

• View PowerPoint Demo
• Download Pop-Under Overview (PDF)

Stay tuned for more enhancements to our Pop-Under ads in the weeks to come!