Blogging to better understand our publishers…
The following is a guest post by Dave Ferro. He’s a director on our product team, an avid rugby player and blogs about his fly-fishing adventures here.
When I interviewed for the job at Lijit, I was asked if I read any blogs, and if I had my own blog. There were a handful of blogs that I read at the time, a couple centered around fly fishing, a weekly column from a sports writer from the bay area, and a few others from the business community that I would check into periodically. As far as writing a blog was concerned, I didn’t figure I had the time, nor would I have assumed that anyone would ever read it. I was told that writing my own blog was going to be a condition of employment; the logic being that to work for a company that provides utility for blog publishers, I should first walk a mile in their shoes. That made sense. Upon receiving the job offer, I went about creating my own blog.
As with many undertakings where one walks in blind, I learned things that I never would have thought of before. The first thing that I learned is that people who you don’t even know will read your blog from places as far away as India, Hong Kong, and Santiago. Even domestic locations like San Antonio and Topeka, where I have never been, and will likely never go.
The second thing I learned about blogging is that there is a veritable plethora of gadgets, widgets, feeds, and other utilities that a publisher can add to his site…the best of which being the Lijit Search Wijit. There are also about a hundred ad networks who will give you a little snippet of code that will place an ad on your site.
Sifting through these ad networks is somewhat of a daunting task. Each of these networks has more or less the same message, “Put our line of code in your site, and we’ll pay you. Not only that, but our black box is the best black box, so we will pay you more than anyone else will.” It all sounded good, so I applied to a few of the bigger names and even a couple of really obscure ones that sound like they are run out of someone’s garden shed.
My site was accepted immediately by one of the household names, and the ones whose websites would have looked lame in 1997. Strangely, my site was rejected by a few upper and middle tier networks, via an impersonal email. Others said that my site was under consideration, and that they would get back to me when they decided that they wanted to work with my site. I love open ended exchanges like this.
I found that once you are accepted by an ad network, you have entered a one-sided partnership. Good luck getting a real answer to a real question. Good luck figuring out why you made 25 cents per click on Tuesday and then 15 cents per click on Wednesday. Some will allow you to block any domains of advertisers that you don’t want to appear on your site, where others leave you with the option of displaying the ads they send you.
At the end of the day, it is your blog, and you have the opportunity to change anything you want. It seems that there is a lot of trial and error you will go through in order to find out what works best for you.
I’ve been at Lijit a few months now, and everything is starting to make more sense. Every product and messaging conversation we have revolves around what we can do to make it easier for publishers, and what we can do to create a better experience for our publishers and their readers. As a product guy, I get to work on features and products that provide utility and real value for our publisher partners. Walking through the trials and tribulations that publishers everywhere will face has given me a better perspective on how to do that.