Lijit

We love hearing what our users have to say. (Especially when it’s good stuff.) One of our favorite blog wranglers, Anne-Marie, was easily convinced at Blog World to tell us why she likes Lijit. Take a look…

If you like what Anne-Marie had to say, be sure to check out her delicious blog, This Mama Cooks, her review blog This Mama Cooks Reviews or the advice she dispenses at The Write Spot or Mom Central Blogger University.

These are just a few of the places she’s blogging. (It makes me tired just to think of all that!) Additionally, you can follow her on Twitter–she’s adding value over there as well.

Many thanks to Anne-Marie for her continued support. With users like this, how can we not be excited about what we’re doing?

Come on in! We’re open!

That’s right, Lijit Publishers! Our Ad network is officially out of beta and we are rolling! We’ve invested a lot both in technology and people power to provide what we think is a great money making vehicle for you. Our Ad Serving Platform is world class and our direct sales force is working directly with the large premium brands and ad agencies to serve the creative you want and expect to match your site and your reader audience.

What does the Lijit Ad Network give you, publisher?
More money making opportunities! Lijit has historically provided you revenue share from advertising displayed and clicked through on your Lijit search results pages but our Ad Network is all new! What’s new for you:

• Front Page Ad Tags: Monetize your blog through the simple installation and display of front-page banners, skyscrapers or sidebar units.
• Premium Advertising: Lijit Network’s sales force works directly with major advertising agencies and brands to reach your readers with meaningful creative that your readers will appreciate…and be more likely to engage with.
• Better Performance: Knowing your site’s content, reader demographics and reader intent allows Lijit to yield better ad performance over prototypical ‘spray and pray’ ad networks. We want your site to have meaningful, contextually relevant and engaging creative your readers will appreciate and move to act on!

How do you install Lijit Ads?

Easy! We’ve made installing ad tags as simple as installing your Lijit Search Wijit. Check it out…

1) Opt in to share revenue with Lijit. You will see a new tab on your Wijits administration page called Ad Many of you have already taken advantage of this by opting into revenue share from your search page ads and if so, you won’t see this step. For newcomers, you will see this simple screen to fill in your account information (e.g. where we send the checks!) and the opt-in information.

2) Create an Ad Tag: With your registration complete, you are immediately presented with Ad Wijit (e.g. ad tag/ad unit) creation tools to post on your site. Creating one is super simple. You select from the styles we offer (e.g. a banner or a skyscraper or a rectangle), name it and you’re done! Create as many as you want!

3) OK, you’re ready to install! Simply save your wijit in the step above and you will be prompted to move to the install screen you see below. Just like your Lijit Search Wijit, we offer simple one-click installs for major blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress and TypePad in addition to providing you the java script for proprietary CMS systems and web site platforms. Once the code is live on your site, you’re set and Lijit can get about its job streaming in ads!

4) You’re done!

With your ad tags installed, Lijit’ will take over from here. Our sales force as mentioned is queuing up premium brand and advertising campaigns which will be served directly form our ad serving infrastructure direct to your ad wijit tags. We stream in creative which will match the effective category, demographic and reader audiences who visit your site. Ads will rotate frequently as our model is to continually ensure 100% fulfillment. When a premium ad is not available, we will display remnant ads to ensure a continual money making stream for you.

How do I get paid?

All of the payment and accounting information is managed in your ‘Account’ management console on Lijit.com when you are signed in. Here you can visualize your ad performance, earnings, modify your account registration information and more.

Need Help?

Contact our Advertising team here in our offices in scenic Boulder Colorado. (advertising at lijit dot com) We’re ready to get your site dialed in and ensure you’re making money right away!

“Crush it. Crush it real good.” (Sorry we had to).

As a startup we believe in passion and crushing it. It’s pretty obvious Gary Vaynerchuk has both in the can, which is why we’re teaming up.

Who: We’re hosting a contest with our friend, Gary Vaynerchuk - the man of hustle, Wine Library TV and the author of the recent book, Crush It.

What: We have five Crush It books, signed by Gary himself ready for you. You know you want to know how “Skills are cheap, passion is priceless.” Here’s all you need to do to be one of the lucky winners.

How: Choose one of these three options:

1. Never used Lijit? Sign up for Lijit’s custom search (we provide you with stats, too), add it to your blog or website, then add (http://crushitbook.com) to your Lijit network.
2. If you’re a current Lijit user just add (http://crushitbook.com) to your Lijit network.
3. If you’re a current Lijit user, get your friends to sign up and use Lijit’s custom search, while also adding (http://crushitbook.com) to their Lijit network.

For points 1 and 3, to sign up be sure to use this link so we can track and include you in the contest.*

Timeline: The contest starts now: October 23rd and lasts until November 6th.

To add (http://crushitbook.com) to your Lijit network: Sign in to your Lijit profile page and click on ‘Network’ at the top or the ‘Edit’ button next to your Network list.

Then, you’ll be on your network page…

At the end of the two weeks, we will pick (at random) five lucky winners who will be on their way to learning how to #crushit.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email Grace.

*You get one contest entry for each friend who signs up with Lijit. Remember, if you have lots of friends (good for you) but it also means you can enter more than once.

Lots of reports over the last couple-a days are hitting the wires on how Microsoft Bing and Google are attacking the problem of adding feeds from Twitter and FaceBook into their respective search indexes. Cool. I personally want my stuff discovered and leveraged by folks the world over as I am proud and confident in the content I publish….be it my blog posts, my tweets, my videos, etc etc. To me as a blogger, this is a good thing, offering additional possibilities of exposure and distribution of my creations.

But I am still wresting with the meaning of ‘real time’ in this context…e.g. how content sources like tweets and public Wall Posts meaningfully get ranked, injected into these types of searches and ultimately yield better ‘discover-ability’ of my content.

But first, humor me. Perhaps I am slow, but I’m not understanding ‘real time search’. To me, ‘real time’ is indicative of push-based notification. In other words an event happens and software triggers a process to push this event and it’s notification package to a recipient. Example: Someone tweets and my desktop tweeting software indicates for me via pop up that a new tweet has occurred…all in ‘near’ real time.

Search, however, is inherently post facto. It is a mechanism of forensics to help humans parameterize what they are looking for on the interwebs and the search tools diligently do their job to identify and produce results in a fairly consistent ‘page rank’-oriented way. Then you start the laborious process of hunting through the results to find the needle in the haystack and hope it’s relevant. In other words, an event happens, the search engine indexes this event (even if moments after it was created in near real time) and thus allows it to be discovered later via search. I think that our CEO Todd Vernon summed up three distinct categories for search really succinctly in his post on this subject of examining real time search…

1. DISCOVERING: Something is happening, it may or may not be something I care about, and I don’t know it’s happening. I usually find out about it via some source, personal network, facebook, twitter, digg, CNN, etc. I don’t have a specific mission to know it before I find out about it.
2. ALERTING: Something is happening and I knew ahead of time I wanted to know about it when it happens. I usually find out about these things via some source such as Google Alerts or Filtrbox. Alerts behave a little like a broad based search with asynchronous results that come back some day.
3. SEARCHING: Something is happening or has happened or simply exists. I want to know more about it. I generally want the best answer, or the most recent answer. I may want the best recent answer, but that’s highly subjective and generally defaults back to my trust in the source as the tie breaker.

So the above known (and I’ll cease and desist on the real time versus retro active search debate for the time being), I have some additional and more important concerns, mainly related to the sheer vastness of the twitterfaceverse and how anything relevant can be discovered from these fire hoses.

Assume someone searches for a term on Bing and they then proceed to the new Twitter timeline result set to poke around at the results. It’s a comprehensive result set at best. But, how am I discovered? Again I’m lost in the sea of the twitter chatter. And as importantly (to me, anyways), how is my trusted network discovered in connection and in context to me during a search as I really want their words, thoughts and images discovered along with mine to help a searcher form an opinion.

To solve this, we did things quite a bit orthogonally here at Lijit to the approach outlined above. We’ve essentially take the ‘internet’ and boiled it down to very explicit and succinct publisher-defined networks. Think of it as filtering the internet’s vastness by producing results based in absolute relevance between sets of trusted associations. If you’ve visited my site, you’re invariably a cycling geek like me. And if you’ve gone so far as to search my site, it’s likely you’ve done so with some strong intent and precision in what you are looking for. Lijit issues results based upon the term’s relevance in all my content and that of my network to provide a super tight snapshot of information we serve to the reader. And like all the content we dish up,  my Tweet’s and TwitPics will all be displayed in addition to those tweets, etc from my network and their chatter about the same topic. We order and display this in very obvious ways including thumbnails to ease discovery….

Net-net, we’ve been doing this ‘real time social media content generation tool’ discovery for some time along with a wrath of on line content sources and have applied relevance to it all. Ultimately when the discussion is all boiled out, the results Lijit produces in contrast with what Bing or Google produce is not unlike the Apples and Oranges analogy and at its core not a debate per se. One yields intentionally focused and ‘tight’ results, the other broad and ‘loose’ results. Both, however, having purpose and fulfilling different search needs. But when pointed at the topic of discovering ‘real time’ micro-blogging content, I am not sure how the ‘broad’ assists in making discovery simple and efficient. These tools are so fundamentally rooted in their network (read: people to people) associations that sifting through the vastness of RT’s, bit.ly’s and tinyurl’s from anonymous and unknown authors and knowing which result to trust and use would be a mind bending, overly complex and time consuming task. But again, all this is strictly my opinion and how I use and value social network tools like Twitter.

So Tweet on. We’ll ensure it is found and understood when its searched for via your trusted Lijit search box on your site.

This was our third year having a booth at Blog World and it just keeps getting better for us. Instead of going on and on about what a great conference it was and how many times our company got mentioned in sessions or during keynotes, we thought pictures might do a better job of telling our story…

Our booth, along with the swag we were handing out, attracted quite the crowd. The  Purell was a big hit…either due to the fact that folks were shaking a lot of hands or that they agreed that Las Vegas was a dirty city.

But, one of the main reasons we go to Blog World is to be immersed in a world we love…that of blog publishers. Seeing their eyes light up when we explain and demo what we do is something that just can’t be described.

Not to mention all the opportunities we have for spreading our message to a larger audience…

However, probably our most favorite thing to do while at a show like Blog World is to thank our current users. Folks like the masterminds behind I Can Has Cheezburger, Neatorama, and WebUrbanist. And slapping a few stickers on cute mommybloggers doesn’t hurt the cause either. (Hi Extraordinary Mommy!)

A conference like Blog World takes a lot of energy. Not only is it a big show, but the fact that it takes place in Vegas makes it all the more tiring. To make sure we were up to the task, we made sure we had all of the essentials covered…

Thanks to everyone we met and to all those who told us how much they loved what we’re doing. Wear your Lijit shirts with pride and we hope to see you next year at Blog World 2010!

[Photo credits: Perry, Grace, Greg and http2007]

Every year, since 2004, Technorati has published the State of the Blogosphere report. The State of the Blogosphere report is considered the best up to date source of information about size, motivations, and practices of long tail publishers.

This year, Lijit helped Technorati by supplying some information from within the blogs that make up the Lijit Network. Lijit performed the analysis on the raw data and only supplied the aggregate insights documented in this post.

Analysis was centered on four distinct areas of interest including Search Engine Referrals, Blogroll Promotion, the Impact of Twitter, Advertising and Analytics.

Methodology

Data for this post was collected from two primary sources both directly collected by Lijit.

The first source of data was the ~11K active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their publications. Lijit builds a unique search corpus for each publisher. This search corpus includes the publisher’s publication, his user-generated content, and the network of the publishers who influence the publisher (i.e., his Blogroll). This network of influencers results in a crawl footprint of over 2.5M publications that we actively index in order to maintain the search functionality on the 11K publisher sites. The second source of data used in this post comes from information gathered on those 2.5M sites in the extended network.

Data was reduced to something we refer to as the ‘typical publisher’. For some measurements, some publishers were omitted from the sample when in our opinion the specific publisher or publishers represented a singularity in the data that masked the typical publisher substantially. In addition, for some of the analysis points, we removed publications with less than 100 page views a day. Where lower page view publishers were removed we point it out. As page views drop into lower numbers some of the data begins to skew and it begins to get difficult to distinguish active and inactive publishers.

Search Engine Referrals

A typical site within the Lijit publisher network receives 27% of its page views from clicks on results in horizontal search engine result pages. As expected, the highest single source of referrals to the typical publisher site is Google at 23.5%. Yahoo and Bing were next, accounting for about 3.2% of referrals. Twitter and Facebook were nearly identical and total about 1.6% of traffic.

Lijit categorizes publications into 23 topical/vertical subject areas. The Tech vertical saw the highest percent of page views from search engine referrals at 41%. The remaining topical areas were fairly consistent with regards to percent referrals.

The percent of page views that come from search engine referrals is fairly constant with the audience size of the publication. The exception to this are publications of less than 100 page views a day that receive a slightly larger percent of page views from search engine referrals at around 30%.

It’s unclear why smaller publications get a larger percent of page views from search engine referrals, but may be linked to the ever growing length of horizontal search engine queries. According to a Hitwise January 2009 Search report, over 50% of queries are now 3 terms or more on the major horizontal search engines. This suggests that as the length of the average query string gets longer, more referrals get passed to smaller publications due to the specificity of the queries. This is a positive trend for smaller publishers.

Blogroll Promotion

Based on the 2.5M publications crawled by Lijit, the number of blogs in the average blogroll is 47, a surprisingly high number. Although not always a prominent feature on a publisher’s site, cross promotion of bloggers by other bloggers is clearly a significant factor in publication readership growth.

The typical publication within the Lijit network of 2.5M sites appears in 6.4 other Blogrolls. In other words, the typical blog is pointed to by 6.4 other blogs. The difference between a blog appearing in 6.4 other Blogrolls and pointing to an average of 47 other blogs is largely due to blogs pointing outside of the Lijit crawl footprint. The Blogosphere is a very large place.

The Impact of Twitter

Publications with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 0.83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This percent tracked very closely to Facebook referrals at 0.80%. Publications below 100 page views a day saw a higher percent of page views from Twitter referrals than Facebook referrals.

Besides horizontal search engines, Twitter is the largest driver of referrals to the typical publication.

Lijit Search aggregates user-generated content that a publisher generates, into search results that display on the publisher’s site. Aggregating this content around a publisher’s site creates a stronger brand association for the reader with that publisher and site.

The most common user-generated content source included within a Lijit Search profile is Twitter. About 50% of Lijit publishers include Twitter in their Lijit Search results. This is a change from prior years. In 2007, 26.6% of publishers included Twitter as a content source in their Lijit Search results. In 2008, 42% of Lijit accounts included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results. In 2009, 50% of publishers included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results.

Twitter was by far the fastest growing content source to be included by Lijit publishers. Clearly, publishers embrace the micro-blog format. Going forward, Lijit intends to track the percent of publishers that use Twitter for blog post promotion as we suspect this number is quite high.

Advertising and Analytics

As Lijit crawls the extended network of publications, we track the widgets and tags we find on those publications. For the first time, Quantcast overtook Google Analytics as the most frequent analytics tag found on publications. This is likely due to Quantcast tags being included in some publishing platform templates.

Comparing 2008 to 2009, there has been a 68% increase in the number of sites with Ad tags installed. This indicates to us that monetizing sites is high on the priority list of most publishers.

Last year, when we ran the analysis, Google Ad tags made up 67% of the Ad tags found. This year that percentage has dropped to 47%, indicating publishers are experimenting with other Ad networks. This is probably not an indication of publishers leaving Google but rather publishers trying other Ad networks and using Google at the end of the Ad rotation.

More Data to Come…

With Lijit’s install footprint of 11K active installed base and a crawl footprint of 2.5M publications, Lijit is becoming the defacto source of information from within publications. Starting in 2010 Lijit will publish a more comprehensive study of what’s happening inside the Blogosphere.

Just because a bunch of us are currently headed to Blog World in Vegas doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped working. In fact, with our most recent release, we’re proud to offer our users more enhanced search results and an easier way of installing Lijit on your blog. That’s right. While it may be hard to believe, we just keep making our search better and better.

Hello Google Gadget!

If you are using Google’s Blogger platform, it is even easier to add Lijit’s search to your site. (And it wasn’t very hard in the first place.) When you are looking in Blogger’s Gadget Gallery, you’ll find that Lijit is now available . You can find us by selecting the “Add a Gadget” link in your blog layout menu, and then searching for “Lijit” in the Gadget Gallery’s search tool.

Once you’ve located the special Lijit gadget, you can easily add our search to your blog even if you don’t already have a Lijit account. It’s easy to create a new account from within the Google gadget without even going to the Lijit site.

If you already have a Lijit account, you can simply enter your Lijit username. Either way, after you’re done with that step, you can decide where you want to put your search (we suggest the top!) and enable our search functionality on your blog within minutes.

If you’ve been looking for a better way to search your Blogspot blog, you now have the power. Give your readers more and do it the easiest way possible.

Twitpic Integration

Another cool piece of yesterday’s release is the ability to bring blog readers even more visual goodness in your search results. If you use Twitpic, it’s now easy to add that account into your Lijit content and have images displayed, similar to what we do with Flickr, on the ‘Content’ tab of your search results.

In order to add Twitpic into your search results, simply log in to Lijit and click on ‘Content’. Underneath the space where you put in your Twitter account, you’ll see an area to put in your Twitpic information. Give us a bit to crawl your pictures and before long, you’ll see Twitpic included as part of your Content search results.

We hope you like our newest enhancements and by all means, we encourage you to share your thoughts. Leave a comment and help us to improve what we’re doing!

**A special shout-out goes to Noah Everett, the brains behind Twitpic.

It’s that time of year again for the geeks and bloggers to arrive in masses and congregate in Sin City for Blog World.

Lijit is gearing up for our third year at the BlogWorld New Media Expo held October 15-17th at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

We will be setting up shop at our Lijit booth (#330 to be exact) equipped of course with our soft, Lijit t-shirts. Our crew will be ready to meet and talk all things wijit. If you’re a Lijit user, want to use Lijit or want some Purell to help clean up your search, then be sure to stop by our booth and say hello!

Don’t forget to catch some Lijit speakers, too! Greg Keller, Lijit’s VP of Product Development will be speaking at WordCamp Las Vegas in coordination with Blog World. At 3:00 PM on Friday, October 16th Greg will be speaking on: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Our Readers - A Study of Reader Profile Data. Micah Baldwin (former VP of Business Development for Lijit) will be speaking on a panel with our CEO, Todd Vernon at 11:30 AM on Saturday, October 17th on Measuring and Building Online Influence.

We look forward to meeting you and please feel free to e-mail Tara (tara at lijit dot com) or Grace (gboyle at lijit dot com) if you would like to set up a specific time to meet. For the latest Lijit news fresh from Blog World, follow us on Twitter (@Lijit) as we hold it down on the expo floor.

Lijit’ees present: Todd Vernon, Walter Knapp, Tara Anderson, Perry Quinn, Grace Boyle and Gregory Keller.

Our fearless leader Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, was interviewed by Robert Scoble during a visit he made to our plush world wide headquarters here in Boulder Colorado. Have a view here or check it out on Building43.com!