We are excited to announce Federated Media Publishing’s new Tech Blog. With FMP’s recent acquisition of Lijit Networks, technology has come to the forefront of the company’s business strategy and the new blog will share details about current and future technology initiatives.
Employees across FMP will lift the curtain and talk about the high level technology behind FMP’s advertiser and publisher products and services. As Tim Musgrove, Chief Scientist and FMP, states: “we’ll share some of the results, surprises and problems we’ve uncovered along the way, as well as our ideas on where things might go in the future.”
We already have a few posts up about current initiatives at FMP:
- Our very own Todd Vernon, Founder and CEO of Lijit and now EVP of Technology at FMP, provides his thoughts on how FMP’s acquisitions of Lijit, TextDigger, FoodBuzz, and BigTent will help turn FMP into a top 5 media property.
- FMP Chief Scientist Tim Musgrove provides a deep dive into Conversation Targeting (CT), a top technology priority for the company in early 2012.
- Peter Ridge, Senior Director of Product Management at FMP, discusses security requirements for a wireless network.
Please take a moment to check out the new site, and let us know what you think!
Tags: industry, Lijit publishers, new features, publishers | View Comments
Lijit’s RTB efforts deliver more money to online publishers
Jan 26th
by Sonya Caprio in Community, Company
Many of you are witness to a shift in the world of online advertising that sees ad networks being replaced by programmatic buying technologies like real-time bidding (RTB) and private exchanges. Technologies like these deliver greater return to both advertisers and publishers by enabling them to connect directly to each other. Advertisers set a price for what they’re willing to pay to access a publisher’s audience, and publishers gain greater control over their inventory while at the same time exposing it to a larger pool of demand sources. RTB is what enables this interaction between advertiser and publisher to take place.
Publishers are the core of our business, and because of that we are constantly looking for new ways to deliver higher CPMs and fill rates. When it comes to RTB, the more DSPs we integrate with, the more access brand advertisers have to our publishers’ inventory. The more demand from brand advertisers, the higher the return we can deliver to publishers.
Today we are pleased to announce our latest RTB integration with XA.net, our newest partner. The partnership with XA.net comes on the heels of a handful of other recent integrations with industry-leading DSPs including MediaMath, m6d, Chango, and MyBuys. With these and many more planned for the coming months, publishers should continue to see higher returns from Lijit’s online advertising services.
Tags: industry, Lijit Advertising Services, Lijit publishers, new features | View Comments
DearBlankPleaseBlank.com was started by Jared Wunsch and Hans Johnson as a hobby while the two were still in undergraduate school. What it has grown into is a collection of websites that also includes IWasteSoMuchTime.com, AttackoftheCute.com, and GrouchyRabbit.com. Collectively they see almost 45 million pageviews per month!
Lijit sat down with Jared Wunsch to find out some of his tricks of the trade. Read on to see what he has to say…
Q: What was your original goal for DearBlankPleaseBlank.com?
A: We were just two kids in college who liked technology and wanted to create stuff online for fun. We took an “if you build it they will come” philosophy and because we didn’t build the site to make money, we designed it exactly how we wanted to without an ad-focused layout in mind. I think that’s part of why we’ve been able to build such an audience… because they see that we’re truly authentic.
Q: You started DearBlankPleaseBlank.com less than two years ago, and have now grown into four sites with a pretty impressive readership! How were you able to grow your traffic so quickly?
A: We listen to our readers. We spend a lot of time on our sites… learning who our users are, what their demographic is, and the kind of content they want to engage with. We get to know our users by actively participating in the conversation, providing comments, and taking feedback into account. We also try to keep things current based on what’s going on in the world. All of this has allowed us to build a pretty strong community that keeps coming back for more.
Direct sales and programmatic sales are often discussed as competing functions within the publisher business model. However, the two channels are distinct enough that they should not compete with each other. In fact, the most successful publishers we work with from a revenue standpoint have a strong aptitude for managing direct and programmatic sales alongside one another. In order to do so most effectively, it is important to understand the distinctions. Specifically, the following five points cover some of the things that publishers can offer advertisers through direct sales that they cannot get through programmatic channels:
- The guarantee/sponsorship/future: Advertisers want the guarantee of being placed next to premium content, above the fold, in front of a guaranteed set of eyeballs, for a specific period of time, at a set rate. Further, media buyers are tasked with spending 100% of their budgets for fear they are reduced next quarter because they didn’t spend enough. Without a guarantee in place with publishers, their media spend is at risk of (a) not being spent or (b) being spent in less than ideal context at the end of a fiscal period. Programmatic buying technology like real time bidding (RTB) provides advertisers/media buyers no guarantee on price, contextual placement, or impression volume.
- Site takeovers and other non-standard ad units: A site takeover or “skin” is very visible to a reader, generates high CTRs, and creates brand awareness. Because of this, takeovers have very high CPM rates and cannot easily be bought or sold on an exchange due to the infinite ways for designing and architecting a site. Likewise, ad units that are not standard IAB sizes (160×600, 300×250, 728×90) can and should be integrated into the unique design and architecture of a site, and sold for premium prices.
- Banners integrated with content: Below is a banner from Miller Light from my Fantasy Football league that has been creatively integrated with content. This banner shows the score of the Fantasy game each week and allows Fantasy players to “Smack Talk.” This must have been an expensive campaign due to the way it is integrated into the site. The more integrated the advertisement is into the content of the site, the less the chance that an algorithm can decide the price programmatically.
- The leading edge of media technology: While there are emerging exchanges for both video and mobile inventory, nothing yet exists that is as efficient as the market for standard IAB display banners. Publishers can much more easily package and directly sell media like video, audio, mobile web, and applications than any exchange currently can. Even as exchanges mature for some of these types of media, there will always be something that is a little newer or more innovative than that which can be quickly commoditized.
- Conversation: Publishers have their own brand. And in the age of social media, brands need to be a part of the conversation. Blog posts, comments, and tweets are where this conversation lives in a public forum. The influence of a publisher’s brand within the conversation should not be underestimated—marketers are willing to pay a lot for it. This is something that our sister company, Federated Media Publishing, is pioneering across the Independent Web.
So why in the world would advertisers ever buy programmatically? It comes down to one thing: audience data. I will delve deeper into this subject in my next post and explore some ways publishers can manage their programmatic channels more effectively. Again, the better a publisher is at understanding the distinctions between programmatic and direct, the better the two channels can compliment each other, working together to maximize inventory value and revenue.
Tags: employee guest post, industry, Lijit publishers, publishers | View Comments
Latest version of Flavors.me allows Lijit’s Audience Analytics!
Dec 27th
by Sonya Caprio in Community
Flavors.me takes social networking a step further. With Flavors.me, users have the ability to display content from all of their social media outlets on one convenient home page. With the ability to integrate Twitter, Tumblr, and 29 other social media sites, Flavors.me is a one stop shop for a publisher’s online presence. From the inexperienced blogger to the expert, the ease of use of Flavors.me makes creating a personal website a no brainer.
The latest version continues to offer all of the tools that we love including the drag and drop interface that removes all the hassle involved with coding a website, the ability to customize all aspects of a page in real-time, as well as some new tools like (you guessed it!) Lijit’s audience analytics. While Flavors.me is a website publishing service that can be used free of charge, upgrading your account to the premium service provides additional tools – like Lijit – that are necessary to make your webpage that much more successful.
If you are a premium Flavors.me user you will be able to get Lijit Audience Analytics, which help publishers better understand their audience so they can make the most out of their Flavors.me website. Publishers can now get access to stats like Audience Demographics and Advertiser Insights which you can’t get anywhere else.
To get started
- Sign-up for an account at http://www.lijit.com/signup
- Select “Audience Analytics” from the Lijit tools & services.
- Copy the code provided and paste it in the “External Stats” section of your stats page on Flavors.me
- Click Complete Sign-up on lijit.com to be taken to your dashboard.
We are excited about this updated release and all the amazing new features such as Lijit’s audience analytics that are now available!
We caught wind of some changes over at SAY Media. Seems they have asked some of their smaller publishers to find an alternate ad network.
We could speculate as to why they made this decision, but that really does not matter much.
What does matter is the publisher.
We would love to extend an invitation to any publishers who would like to work with us over here at Lijit.
Publishers are our people.
Let us know right away if we can help you continue your revenue stream – especially at the most important time of the year.
Here is more information on our ad services.
Please email us and a member of our publisher development team will be in touch shortly. We look forward to working with you.
Happy Holidays!
Tags: industry, Lijit publishers, publishers | View Comments
We just rolled out our last major software release for 2011 and we’re capping the year off with even more updates to our publisher analytics and our ad platform. This year has been incredible for Lijit, and seen us grow our advertising platform and publisher analytics products to create what we believe to be the best publisher platform out there.
Ad Metrics Updates
We made some great refinements to the way we present ad metrics in our publisher dashboards. We pulled together the most important ad metrics we offer publishers and integrated them into the dashboard. It now features not only the normal graphs and stats you expect, but we’ve included charts that show CPM , fill rate, and click performance. This brings all of the metrics you care about into one area and enables you to , at a glance, understand your ad performance.
Universal Stats Support
We finished rolling out our universal stats package to all of our publisher stats. This means that anyone who uses a Lijit product can now get access to all of the analytics we provide. Publishers who only use our ad services have access to new page view reporting in their Audience dashboard, and will continue to see more stats as we make them available.
Advertiser Insights
In case you missed it, we also recently rolled out our new Advertiser Insights analytics. These cool analytics highlight which brands are engaging with your audience, and help publishers by supporting their direct sales efforts and support development of content to attract brand advertisers. Every Lijit publisher receives this data, so login now and check out which brands are most aligned to your site’s audience.
Looking at 2012
More, more, more. We’re excited about continuing to bring publisher’s the information and analytics they need, and helping them build a business around their publication. We’ll continue to improve our publisher analytics tools, and plan to add even more ways to look at your site and your audience to empower you to be a better publisher.
Our advertising platform will continue to grow to support Lijit’s incredible growth, and you can look forward to world class advertising products appearing throughout 2012. Overall, we’re incredibly excited about what we accomplished in 2011, and can’t wait to show you what we have in store for 2012.
Last night Lijit held our annual holiday party at Lucky Pie Pizza in Louisville, CO. With the recent acquisition of Lijit by Federated Media Publishing, it was an honor to have Founder and Executive Chairman John Battelle, as well CEO Deanna Brown in town for the festivities.
Thank you to all the members of the Lijit band that rocked the house last night as well as John Battelle for making a cameo appearance on the drums. Check out his award winning performance here!
Shout out to Lijit rock-stars Manny Puentes, Mike Meredith, Zach Conger, Janessa Ho, Meaghan Kelly, and Zach Miller for keeping us dancing all night long. Rock on.
The holiday party was a great success and a wonderful way to reflect on and celebrate our accomplishments. Check out the photo above of our CEO Todd Vernon going down the long list of Lijit milestones in 2011.
Tags: events, fun, good times, lijit | View Comments
Lijit recently hit 400m average daily ad impressions across our network so to celebrate this major company milestone we took the company go kart racing. It was the perfect activity for the Lijit team – a group of highly competitive, active employees who are in it to win it. While many of us were hoping for “bumper car” style which would allow us to throw some punches at each other, we played by the rules and focused entirely on speed.
Our CEO Todd Vernon is quite the race car driver so in the true spirit of intimidation he showed up with his own helmet (note the Lijit sticker on his helmet in the photo below!). We were placed into three different heats and each heat had two chances to make their best time. The 10 fastest racers made it to the finals… and the winner was? Our very own CEO! Check out the picture of Todd below with his winner’s flag.
Some of us are hobbling around today with bruises, soar limbs, and kinked necks but all in all it was a blast and we hope to be celebrating new milestones with another day of go kart racing in the months to come!
Tags: events, get to know Lijit | View Comments
Introducing Lijit’s Advertiser Insights for online publishers.
Dec 5th
by Sonya Caprio in Company, Lijit publishers, features, release announcements
It is a core company philosophy at Lijit that from an analytics perspective we feed as much data as possible back to our publishers, and that we make the data so easily digestible that you can take immediate action on it. It’s what we like to refer to as “actionable analytics.”
Today Lijit released a new tool as part of our audience analytics platform called Advertiser Insights. Advertiser Insights provides publishers with a list of the top brands that align to your site’s readers. Publishers can use this data to support direct sales efforts as well as to develop editorial content that better attracts top brand advertisers. Any publisher using any of Lijit’s services (ad services, analytics, and/or reader engagement tools) now receives Advertiser Insights in their publisher dashboard – just log in today and check it out!
Simple to digest? Couldn’t be easier.
What’s cool about our new Advertiser Insights data is that it highlights the brands that align to your site’s readers, not just your site itself. It aggregates all of the data we have as readers traverse the entire Lijit network, and provides the information back to publishers to apply directly to your site.
With over 150,000 sites and 300 million global uniques, the Lijit Network continues to grow exponentially. We’ve seen a 700% growth in ad calls in 2011 alone, and currently deliver over 11 billion ad impressions each month. Now that’s a lot of reader data we’re trying to reflect back to publishers!
As we look for new ways to help publishers build their business using valuable analytics, we will continue to leverage the power of the Lijit Network to help publishers grow their site and make more money through targeted advertising. To read more about the value of a network, check out a previous blog post from Lijit’s COO Walter Knapp, “For a Publisher, the Network Matters.”
Tags: Lijit publishers, new features, publishers, release announcements | View Comments