Anyone can now sign into any Trafficspaces ad platform with a Facebook, Twitter, Google/Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Blogger account. Yep, that’s right – advertisers no longer need to fill a signup form.

This feature has been on our todo list for over 4 months, and was constantly postponed and postponed again until we finally got our act together and implemented it.

It is ridiculously simple to use. For example if an advertiser has a Facebook account, they just need to click on the Facebook logo and they’ll be redirected to Facebook to login and connect their account to your ad platform. No passwords, no forms. That’s all it is. They are logged in – as simple as A-B-C.

It makes it easy for advertisers to get started so you won’t lose any potential advertiser because of the pain of filling yet another sign up form.

Go on, try it out in the demo. Kudos to RPX for helping us make it possible.

Related posts:

1. How to Set Your Ad Prices Via a Real-time Auction Like Google and Facebook
2. OpenX vs Google Ad Manager – Which is better?
3. Google Ad Manager vs OpenX vs Trafficspaces

As most of you already know, we launched Trafficspaces to give publishers more control on how to manage their ad inventory. Since then, we have received tons of emails about our free 7 day trial and suggestions on how to make the platform serve you better.

We’ve been asked frequently to provide a free version of the platform and we are happy to say it is finally here.  The Free package is designed for those of you who prefer extending the trial further than 7 days.

As many can testify, having your own customized ad managing platform allows you to

• keep 100% of your ad sales,
• develop a closer and trusting relationship with your advertisers.

It is a win-win game. You get to keep 100% of your ad revenue and provide your advertisers will with an easy-to-use branded ad manager. You’ll build a strong relationship with them which encourage them to continue buying advertising from you.

So what are you waiting for? Try the free package today and let us know what you think.

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1. Techcrunch Switches to Self-Service Ad Platform and Validates Trafficspaces’ Business Model.
2. The Trafficspaces Business Model Explained
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Chris Petersen has a successful blog. He generates millions of page views monthly, which he currently monetizes with Google AdSense and a couple of other ad networks.

He also gets about 10 – 20 emails from advertisers every day. Requests range from “Send me your price list (or rate card in advertising lingo)” to “Can we get a 40% discount if we commit to advertising for 6 months”.

Poor (and I use that term lightly) Chris just wants to write content so he does a quick search on Google, and discovers a little tool called Trafficspaces. Great. Now, advertisers can just book their ads online and get their discounts automatically. Problem solved. Err, no.

It turns out that Chris doesn’t really know what price to sell his ad spaces – $10CPM for the home page leaderboard?, $0.10 per click for the text ads near the footer? To compound the problem, it turns out that his advertisers all have different opinions on what the “right price” is.

Solution – use an auction. Duh! Google does it, Facebook does it. Of course, it makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that before.

This story is pretty common, so we’ve added auction-based pricing to Trafficspaces.

Here is how it works:

1. You set up your minimum price, and the incremental amounts that advertisers are allowed to bid.

2. At checkout, the advertiser specifies their budget and their max bid price

3. For every impression that is served, the ad server runs an auction and the ad with the best bid and performance wins. Simple.

Now you have the elegance of Facebook and Google Auctions for a fraction of its price.

Related posts:

1. The login screen now supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and more
2. How to Sell Ads Online > Let the Market Determine the Price via an Auction (6/7)
3. OpenX vs Google Ad Manager – Which is better?

What’s the difference between a  Facebook text ad and a Google text ad? Well it is simple really. Google ads are plain old text ads whilst Facebook ads have little pictures attached that help to illustrate the text.

Personally, I love picture text ads. I think they are a great way for advertisers to grab people’s attention and convey a message to their target audience in a way that a plain old text ad just can’t do anymore.

In our ad management system – Trafficspaces, we made a conscious decision to support Picture in Text Ads by default. It was a no-brainer. Here are the two main reasons why:

1. Ad Blindness

Plain Old Text Ads are ubiquitous and have lost their novelty. There are way too many of them across the web and after a while, they all tend to look the same.  This is bad news for advertisers. Pay Per Click or no Pay Per Click, advertisers are interested in results.  If people are just going to “not see” the ads, then they are a waste of time for both publisher and advertiser.

2. The Craigslist Effect

I’m not sure if you experience this as well. Whenever I search for something on Craigslist, or any other classified listings site, I always tend to seek out the ads that have pictures first. It is just instinctive. Sometimes, I even amend the search tool to only show ads with pictures.

It isn’t surprising. Our perceptive senses are highly tuned towards pictures over text. Why spend time reading a whole load of text when you can get the same message with a picture.

Here is a screenshot of a typical Trafficspaces “Text + Picture” Ad (with Dynamic Themes enabled)

When you signup for your own Trafficspaces platform, and setup a text ad space, you are implicitly telling potential advertisers that they can show Facebook style Text + Picture ads, and with all the benefits that come with them.  

Now that’s how to stand out from the crowd.

No related posts.

When we started Trafficspaces, we knew we had to face two formidable and cash-rich competitors – Google and OpenX.

Most people would have caved in, rather than face the 800 pound gorilla (Google) and the battle-hardened war horse (OpenX). The main challenge then was how we were going to differentiate ourselves from these two massive firms.

As a good friend told me, "A lot of innovation is done by smaller companies – not the large ones. Find out what these two companies aren't doing very well, fix it, and make it your signature".

Well it happens that there was one thing OpenX didn't do very well. It just wasn't user-friendly enough. Rightly or wrongly, OpenX has a reputation of being a highly technical software to manage. There were

• installation issues
• somewhat confusing workflow
• bugs, patches etc (but aren't all software systems plagued by these?)

OpenX is open-source software which means theoretically, you can delve into the code and fix the problems yourself but very few people I know relish the thought of sifting through thousands of lines of PHP code. Most people just want it to work without having to think too hard about how it does it.

The OpenX team have put in a lot work to improve the system quite a bit since the hey days (when it was known as phpAdsNew and then OpenAds) but the unfortunate reputation is still there and as is often said, perception is reality.

Then there's Google. Riding on the back of its phenomenally successful AdSense program, Google bought Doubleclick and soon after launched Ad Manager. Like many people out there, I rushed to try it out. One word – Anticlimax.

Google Ad Manager (now called Doubleclick for Publishers) works okay but there's just something about it that's not as sexy as when you set up an AdSense account and waiting for your first ads to appear. I got no thrill and frankly, was bored after 5 minutes of poking around the workflow. It clearly wasn't "it".

Then the reviews started coming in and the damning indictment from Bernand Lunn's famous article "Manifesto to Avoid a Google Media Monoculture", and followed up upon by Tim Cadogan (OpenX's CEO) comments essentially alleging that through Google Ad Manager, Google will collect enough information about your direct sales activities to pay you less AdSense income.

Hmm… sheath your swords boys.

In summary, we weren't fully satisfied with the systems offered by the two big elephants in the room, and judging from the enquiries that we are currently getting about Trafficspaces, so are a lot of other people.

Armed with enough information, we decided to create a simple yet powerful, and crucially user-friendly system. By user friendly, I mean, even my grandma should get it. But seriously, we wanted to create a system that

• required no installation,
• has a simple workflow,
• can eliminate those annoying "email me if you want to advertise" messages we inevitably put on our Advertise Here page (read: self-service), and
• of which the publisher feels "complete ownership" (read: white label).

I won't say we are completely there yet but we are working very hard to achieve all the above.

What do you think? You can post your comments below. 

Related posts:

1. OpenX vs Google Ad Manager – Which is better?
2. How to Set Your Ad Prices Via a Real-time Auction Like Google and Facebook
3. The login screen now supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and more