Posts Tagged ‘events’
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!
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Employees, investors, and friends of Lijit recently celebrated our acquisition by Federated Media with a party at one of Boulder’s newest restaurants, The Kitchen [Next Door]. The restaurant is one of downtown Boulder’s latest additions, serving as a more casual take on the farm-to-table concept that has made its sister restaurant, The Kitchen, a Boulder hot-spot for many years.
The Lijit team loves a good party and in true Lijit fashion we did it up right! On the day we announced the acquisition, our CEO Todd Vernon proclaimed it a “Major Martini Day” and we doctored up a poster in his honor. Check out some of the photos below to get a glimpse of our celebration…
Tags: events, Lijit employees, Todd Vernon | View Comments
On Tuesday, September 20 Lijit’s CEO and Founder Todd Vernon had the privilege of speaking at Federated Media’s Signal Chicago conference. His presentation, titled “Using Supply Side Platforms, Real-Time Bidding, and Private Exchanges to Reach the Independent Web at Scale,” provides a brief overview of the latest technologies in online advertising.
In this session, Todd discusses the following:
- How to use SSPs (supply side platforms) to source inventory
- How brand marketers can use audience analysis to reach desired themes and conversations
- How to expose audience and content segments to automated buyers
- How to use audience futures to reserve media through private exchanges
Check out his quick, 10-minute presentation below. Enjoy!
Tags: events, industry, Lijit Advertising Services, speaking, Todd Vernon | View Comments
To follow up on our last post, here are some interesting findings from b.media forum. The consumer panel – including four consumers ranging from high school age to upper 20’s – provided a lot of interesting feedback on information consumption and sharing habits. Read on to see what our consumer panelists had to say…
Information consumption:
- Nobody reads hard copy newspapers and very few read magazines; everyone goes online to find out news and information.
- Every consumer has purchased at least one app for their phone and/or iPad. On average, tech-savvy consumers have 60+ apps downloaded to their phone but are only actively using 10-15.
- When it comes to online advertising, brand perception isn’t affected if consumers see ads on a “bad” site; however, perception of a website’s quality is absolutely affected if the publisher shows poor-quality/irritating ads (e.g. pop-ups).
- Very few click on ads but when they do, it’s contextually relevant advertising.
Information sharing:
- 3b new photos are uploaded to Facebook each month but there’s a movement towards real-time photo uploads. Nobody had uploaded an entire photo album to Facebook for over six months.
- High school kids use text and Facebook to communicate with their network, with 2x the use of text compared to Facebook. They don’t use LinkedIn and rarely use email (other than Facebook’s email platform).
- An estimated 20-30% of high school kids use Twitter. When they do, it’s to post “random” comments and follow celebrities.
- High school kids haven’t yet been exposed to Quora; young adults use it to find information but rarely, if ever, post questions or answers.
- Young adults primarily use Twitter and Facebook for communication. Tech-savvy consumers are increasingly turning to Twitter to communicate because they are overwhelmed by the amount of “friends” and Facebook requests (e.g. Farmville).
- Every consumer and almost every b.media attendee has changed their Facebook privacy settings.
And for those of you who haven’t yet watched our b.media video, enjoy!
b.media forum from Lijit on Vimeo.
Tags: events, industry, Lijit publishers | View Comments
Last week I had the pleasure of being on a panel at the Forum and Communities conference in San Francisco.
Since the inception of Lijit we have worked with publishers who have amazingly engaged communities of readers. Many of these publishers are in the mid- and long-tail. They have highly niche and conversational sites which encourages readers to engage by returning often, leaving comments, etc. My personal theory is that it’s because blogs tend to surface more of the personality of the author. Over time this personality acts as meta-data that the reader uses to form a bond with the publication, resulting in higher reader engagement. Lijit’s services were designed to help publishers foster this engagement.
Participating in the Forum and Communities conference introduced me to a different kind of publisher. Forums or message boards are places where extreme enthusiasts come to together online to share information about their deepest passions. For example, I regularly browse car forums to find information about the cars I own. I recently dug up some facts on the Camaro5 forum about how to install an aftermarket part. Forums are an amazing wealth of information. Many call forums the original social network.
Forums tend to get a lot of their traffic from Google and other horizontal search engines. That makes sense given all the original user generated content (UGC) that appears on forums. Interestingly, forums tend to receive very few referrals from social network services such as Twitter of Facebook which probably has something to do with their makeup. Forums tend to focus on the community without having a clear central personality. This makes it difficult to leverage a personality-based service like Twitter to drive traffic.
With a little creativity, however, forums could easily leverage these social tools. When I look at sites like icanhascheezburger.com, the CEO Ben Huh has done an excellent job with Twitter serving as a single personality who represents a curated site where content is created by the community. Ben highlights various posts and general information about the site which helps engage the community and keeps readers coming back for more.
I really enjoyed the time I spent with forum publishers and am committed to finding ways that Lijit can work with them to provide the same great business partnership we have with mid- and long-tail sites!
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Are you interested in learning more about how to create and manage online communities?
Then come join us at the Forum and Communities Conference in San Francisco next Wednesday, February 16. Todd Vernon, Lijit’s founder and CEO, will be speaking on a panel titled “Technology and Community” along with executives from eBay, VigLink (a Lijit partner), and CloudFlare. The panel will be moderated by Dan Gill, co-founder and CEO of Huddler.
During this one-day event, a team of experts will provide guidance on how to effectively engage with communities, give tips on how to maximize the value of communities, and offer insights into new services to try and trends to watch out for. Click here for additional details on the event. We hope to see you there!
Tags: events, industry, Lijit publishers, publishers, Todd Vernon | View Comments
This past weekend, from Thursday, September 9th to Saturday September 11th Lijit was a sponsor, attendee and presenter at BlogPaws WEST 2010.
We had never attended a pet blogging conference before and it turned out to be an incredible experience. The pet blogging community is relatively *new* but I was thoroughly impressed with the level of interaction, engagement and interest in becoming a better blogger, giving back to causes, shelters and animal welfare groups (as part of their blogging initiative) and the amount of passion that goes into what they do.
As I blogged about last week, prior to the conference, the event was held at the Denver Grand Hyatt, a pet friendly hotel. We ran into dogs, cats (in their own strollers), parrots and ferrets that were along for the ride, with their owners. The event was very well-planned, I noticed no scheduling issue and everyone was so amicable. I felt relaxed the entire conference (if you go to conferences, you might realize this isn’t a common feeling).
During my session everyone had great questions! It was fun to interact with bloggers, learn about what is important to them and demo what Lijit does, the stats that help you understand your readers, our custom search and the advertising opportunities we provide for all our publishers. They were particularly excited because we do not have a page view cutoff and we’re extremely inclusive for publishers wanting to test our advertising (or the long tail, no pun intended)!
Tags: events, Lijit publishers, speaking | View Comments
Not only is Lijit HQ in downtown Boulder, but if you combine all of our employees we boast a group of cyclists, marathon runners, skiers, snowboarders and health food aficionados. It’s safe to say, we’re big fans of our Earth, as are our amazing publishers.
Here’s what some of our publishers are writing about on Earth Day:
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We first met The Broke-Ass Bride and her adorable partner in crime, The Fresh Hubby, last year at Blog World. They were leisurely strolling the Expo floor and were really excited once they found out what Lijit could do for their blog. As a newlywed myself at the time, I thought the idea behind their blog was brilliant and admired their obvious love for one another. Not to mention the fact that the Bride can rock a retro look with the best of them AND the Hubby has hair that’s to die for. How could we not feature them on our blog?
Whether you’re currently planning your wedding or are simply looking for romantic money-saving tips, The Broke-Ass Bride provides much inspiration on both fronts. Dana (the actual broke-ass bride) offers tips on how to be a better negotiator, how to decorate on a budget, and, of course, easy ideas for saving money before the big day. Let’s see what else Dana has to say…
Tags: events, Lijit publishers, publisher spotlight | View Comments