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Not ones to sit on the sidelines and twiddle our thumbs when it comes to serving up the latest in ad serving technology, OrbitScripts is proud to announce delivery of our newly developed Floating Ads Plug-in. This new plug-in provides owners of our Orbit Ad Server and Orbit Ad Market ad serving systems the technology to display floating ads on all of their websites.
Floating ads, also known as overlay ads, are a type of digital advertising format employed by a number of companies and websites across the Internet. Similar to a pop up ad, floating ads typically offer a more unique viewing experience that can include animation, sound, and video. Floating ads may be scheduled to appear when a website is loaded. They give the impression of magically floating “over” the website itself before they disappear on their own, after a customizable period of time (on average, 10 sec).
Overlay ads are perceived as less annoying than pop ups because they can be made fairly small and don’t take over the screen. Floating ads are highly profitable among available digital ad formats. Industry studies show overlay ads garner high click thru rates (CTR), in the neighborhood of 30 clicks per thousand impressions. Expandable ad numbers exceed the CTR of typical banner ads.
Users love interactivity. Dynamic digital ad campaigns created with unique eye-catching ads engage the eye and command attention. For instance, to capture the imagination of a travel market segment, envision an animated window that suddenly appears depicting a picturesque sandy beach, where sunbathers relax and play. Nothing motivates someone trapped in a cube and chained to a computer screen like a sunsplashed beach! Why not make this your ad on your website?
Floating ads stick in the minds of viewers and drive them to websites and conversion. Ad tracking analytics found that not only do users click more often on floating ads than on other ad campaign types, but they also reload the page to see them again.
Bringing floating ads to the attention of your advertisers’ core audience, brings your business more ad revenue!
If we can answer any questions you have on overlay ads or you’d like a consult on how our Floating Ads Plug-in can work for you, please feel free to contact us.
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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If you administrate a system that receives a large volume of online ad traffic or you plan to grow your business and increase your web traffic, then you need ad serving software that can handle the demands of your business. As you reach for your target market and that audience responds, the load on your ad servers increases proportionally.
Unfortunately, simply adding more servers won’t resolve this issue. You need ad serving technology with the brains and brawn to:
1. Increases your computational resources
2. Create a scalable, intelligent, allocated system
To answer the call of high volume ad trafficking, OrbitScripts created Enterprise, a peak performance ad serving solution for high load systems. Enterprise ad serving software is built to handle heavy loads of 100 million or more ad impressions a day.
The intelligent architecture of our high performance system:
The key to ad server optimization is intelligent allocation of critical resources. Let’s take a look at the tasks and challenges we faced when developing Enterprise:
1. Ad servers process large quantities of data per day.
Your business requires that your ad servers analyze, move, store and deliver large amounts of data in a millisecond’s time. All day, every day.
It takes approximately 1KB of data to display one ad. So, 100 million ad impressions a day means about 100-150 GB of data that must be processed and analyzed by your ad servers. To meet this challenge Orbitscripts’ Enterprise applies a two-pronged solution:
· Sequential data processing
· Data distribution across multiple statistics nodes (blocks, units)
2. Fault-tolerant design keeps your ad servers up and running.
Machines break. That’s a fact. A successfully configured system takes that fact into account and builds in a work around; so the entire system doesn’t crash because one component fails.
We’ve done extensive load and stress testing to isolate and identify which nodes are critical to high performance, high load ad serving. We’ve integrated that knowledge into our Enterprise ad serving software to conserve, maximize and duplicate (where necessary) computing resources to preserve the function of the whole in the event of part’s malfunction.
Our research shows a fault-tolerant system must:
· Duplicate system nodes to ensure data continuity and integrity.
· Execute data storage methods that retain data without loss when one node fails.
· Ensure that when the failed node comes back online data is redistributed and stored with processes that preserve the data stream and your ad revenue.
Enterprise employs several statistics nodes and replicates data from a master database to a slave database to answer these challenges. The slave database is then used to display ads.
3. Manage peak loads for continuous peak performance.
As your ad servers interact with your user base, your ad serving system allocates server loads asynchronously. That is: some dayparts take a heavier toll on your ad servers performance and computation resources. We researched a large population of web sites across a diverse set of variables to get a sense of how peak loads effect an ad management system.
Please take a look at the diagram below:
The diagram illustrates that ad server loads are allocated asynchronously with peak loads clocking in at 1.5 to 2 times higher than the average system load. High peformance, high availability ad serving systems handle as much as 150- 200 million ad impressions per day at peak load times.
4. Data synchronization allows for replicated and uninterrupted data flow.
To establish data consistency between server clusters in a distributed system, Enterprise uses data synchronization techniques. Data from ads displayed by the Web Server Node (see the first diagram) are processed and transferred to the Slave Database (Slave DB). Before that happens, the data is processed and analyzed by a Statistics Node and stored in the Master DB. Grouped data from the Master DB will be passed to the Slave DB.
Using a daemon (background process) to track changes in the Web Server Node, Enterprise harmonizes your data and to ensure that it’s always available and accurate.
When developing the data transfer protocols in the DB nodes, we used MySQL tools for data replication. MySQL provides an excellent, open source solution for high speed data transmission..
5. Stay on top of operational data and stay within your clients’ budget.
Client relationships are at the heart of every successful online ad network. Internet advertising agencies need to keep tight control over budgets in a world that moves by the millisecond. When high loads put strain on your servers, your systems still needs to track ad display data; so as not to exceed your advertisers’ budget.
Under high load pressures your ad servers must take split second readings on the state of your advertisers’ budget limits and monitor the changes that occur with each click or ad impression. Our stress test data indicates that disk storage is not up to the task, so we decided to store data in RAM using the Redis archive.
Redis is an open-source, networked, key-value data store solution that achieves data persistance by holding data in RAM. Redis supports master-slave data replication and transfers datasets from memory to disk asynchronously. Redis can support replication to any number of slaves and one slave can be a master to another. Our research found Redis to be a highly agile method offering high performance data availability.
6. Improve processing speed; manage high volume traffic fast and efficiently.
Displaying web ads in real time response to user clicks and page loads across high volumes of traffic requires advanced ad serving technology. Running a system at the high speeds necessary to meet the goals of your thriving business, means your ad serving software must intelligently distribute tasks across system nodes. Every node and server and the system as a whole must be optimized to run at peak performance with each and every ad impression.
We recommend a multi-tiered approach:
· Optimize and adjust your operating system.
· Optimize and adjust Web Server Node settings.
· Optimize and adjust DB Node settings.
· Use archives and data caching.
6. Scalable servers rise to the occasion.
Server scalability means your ad management system answers server load increases when they happen. Enterprise servers optimize your system’s architecture to horizontally expand new nodes in sync with the demands of your target audience.
The key advantage of system scalability is that you only need to increase computing resources (nodes) when your ad servers hit peak loads. You save money on additional hardware and don’t have to change the architecture of your system or nodes.
Enterprise, the latest in high performance ad serving technology:
Let’s review the internal processes that make Enterprise servers the high performance choice for your high volume ad trafficking needs (Take a look at the architecture of our high performance system above).
To achieve high speed data processing for each click or ad impression on a website in your system, Enterprise saves that data as a file on the Web Server Node.
A Statistics Node queries the Web Server Node for new files using synchronized data transfer transport protocols. When there are new files, the Statistics Node processes, groups and saves them to the Master Database Node.
The grouped data received from Web Server Node moves to the Master DB Node. The Master DB Node saves data in a format convenient for data management and analysis, but not for quick selection for display on websites. So the Slave DB Node steps in to display ads. All information from the Master DB Node is replicated to the Slave DB Node where it is converted into a format that facilitates quick selection and display.
All changes to data in the Master DB Node (newly grouped data from the Statistics Node) are replicated in the Slave DB Node ensuring that information required from the Web Server Node is always actual and up to the millisecond – protecting your business relationships. Replication of data from the Master DB Node to the Slave DB Node not only optimizes ad display speeds. The Slave DB Node doesn’t enter changes into the Master DB Node when displaying ads; so your system makes optimal use of your computational resources when server loads are at peak demand.
When the Web Server Node is responsible for displaying ads, selection and ad displays are optimized by: reducing the number of queries to the Web server, modifying keywords relevant to searches, targeted processing, reducing session cookies, optimization of security policies, modifying cron scripts and more.
Enterprise delivers a powerful ad serving solution that gives your business a competitive edge:
· High performance system architecture
· Cutting edge ad serving technology
· Your system scales to deliver billions of ads per month without breaking a sweat.
· Rapid ad display captures your core audience.
· Operate within your own domain (using first party cookies). You own all of your data with no need to resort to third-party cookies.
· Deploy your data assets to your advantage and reach customized audience segments with geo-targeting, content-targeting, and behavioral targeting strategies right on your own ad servers.
· Optimize delivery of your ad campaigns with real-time prioritization and reporting.
· Optimize fraud protection and more…
Enterprise is built to handle the high performance needs of heavy load websites such as large Internet stores, high traffic fora, social networks etc..
Enterprise will be available soon on www.orbitscripts.com! Stay Tuned!
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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The shortest path to the success of your web advertising business is sales of ads to direct advertisers. You focus on the work you enjoy while you earn money with your website. The big issues facing every website owner are the same: Where to get direct advertisers? How do I attract top advertisers to my website? Where do I even begin?
Know your stuff!
No matter if your website is devoted to computer tech, bird watching, weight loss, or the-latest-whatever; you’ve got to be right on top of what’s hot in your subjecty area. Someone else’s blog or website is just a mere click away. Update regularly. Captivate your audiences. Make sure your content is current and fresh!
Know your audience!
This is your ad platform. You’re building your ad network. You need to know who your customers (site visitors) are, what they like and what they don’t. What do they need? What products compliment the topic of your website? Contextual advertising is a big winner in the online advertising game. What are the top notch binoculars that are all the rage in the bird watching community? What’s the cool new computer gadget all the kids are talking about? What are trending celebrities using to look fit and trim on the red carpet? Give your audience what they want.
Be able to inform and entice potential advertisers with web analytics, reporting and metrics regarding the visitors to your website. How old are they? What are their interests? Income? Gender? Geographic location? Average level of education? Favorite activities, etc.. The more you know. The more you sell.
If your website is focused on travel to the world’s top beach destinations, then ski clothing retailers are not likely to be talking to their niche market.
Just as you would target ads to your web visitors. Use your energy wisely. Do some research to find the right advertisers to help you monetize your site’s traffic.
Monitor the market and your competitors’ websites:
· Examine your competitors. Take time to examine the websites of your competitors (or even just similar websites). Find out who is advertising on these sites. Follow the ads to visit their advertisers’ websites. Look for those advertisers’ contact information and give it your best shot!
· Social Networks. Explore communities and groups in tune with your website’s subject matter. Who’s advertising there? For instance, look at the facebook page for groups centered on electronic engineering what ads from that page would interest readers of your IT website. What ads do you see on the National Audobon Society’s blog? Who’s interacting on the twitter feed of the hottest new diet guru?
· Offline companies. Look to companies located in your region that might be interested in online advertising on your websites. If they don’t already have a strong brand presence online, offer to help them branch out with an Internet advertising campaign.
· Print. Don’t forget! Newspapers and magazines are full of advertising. Their whole business model is build on it. Check out trade journals, newsletters, and regional rags. You could find a treasure trove of advertisers looking for the right opportunity to reach out to an online market.
Approach direct advertisers and make them an offer they can’t refuse! 
Create a clear and concise commercial offer that describes all the advantages of your websites and your readership.
Provide advertisers information in detail that shows them why they should choose your website for their Internet advertising campaigns.
1. High traffic audience. Use web analytics software to provide hard numbers on your daily web traffic.
2. Demonstrate clear potential for return on their investment. Everybody’s favorite: ROI. The topic of your website should relate directly or indirectly to your target advertisers’ products or services. Contextual advertising helps your advertiser get more conversions on their ad, increasing their ROI and yours. Let them know you’re using the latest ad tools and ad management software from Orbitscripts!
3. Start with lower prices. By offering lower prices as you get started, you’ll be able to work with advertisers who don’t have access to a high ad spending budget. Your ad network will grow as will competition for ad placements on your websites. Who knows! Perhaps by providing lower prices to advertisers building their business you may just be able to grow your businesses together. Strong, repeat client relationships are essential to the success of every business.
4. Offer innovative ad formats. Most ad networks offer the ability to display text or image ads. So don’t bore your potential advertisers! Set yourself apart from the competition by offering flash, rich media, pop up ads, pop under ads, floating ads, expandable banners, in-text ads, video ads, mobile ads and other ad types. Orbit Ad Server software supports a rich variety of ad formats. Let your advertisers know their ads won’t be boring!
5. Provide the option of different payment methods. Show advertisers your business is professional and ready to work with their business model. The Internet is a world wide market place. Your advertisers could come from any corner of the globe. By offering diverse payment methods you’ll show advertisers you’re ready to do business online. Potential payment methods include: pay per click, pay per impression, pay per lead, pay per sale and so on.
Create attractive packages for advertisers and you’ll form new and long-term business relationships.
Sell directly
· Online advertising (search engines, forums, websites). Become an advertiser to attract advertisers. Create appealing banners that demonstrate the beauty and benefits of your website’s banner ads. Orbitscripts banner ad software makes it easy! Banner rotators show off your website’s ad management software and ability for unique and diverse ad delivery. Use a few words to describe the benefits of your ad network.
· Referral links. Offer a links exchange or ad exchange with major websites to reach advertisers and tell them about your network. You know what they say about friends in high places!
· E-mail to introduce yourself. Compose a message that describes all of the advantages of your advertising platform and why your system and your web traffic works for them.
· Good old fashioned phone calls. Cold calls may not be fun, but they’ll never lose that personal touch. Once you’ve found a potential advertiser, call them. A call shows an advertiser that you are a real person who cares about helping them realize their business goals. If you’re looking for local or regional advertisers (town/region/ even country) offer them a face-to-face meeting where you can present the benefits of your audience, your system and your special pricing.
Orbit Ad Server’s advertising solution and plug-ins offer a variety of ad formats, payment methods, strategic targeting ad tools and intelligent reporting. Show potential advertisers your system uses the latest in ad serving software and that they can leverage that technology to promote their products online. Orbitscripts suite of ad network and ad serving software products will attract advertisers and help you monetize your websites.
Remember! First you work for your reputation and then your reputation works for you!
Stay Tuned with Orbitscripts!
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We’ve got great news! The Orbitscripts innovative technology your business trusts now builds and manages affiliate networks. We’ve released a new product, Orbit Affiliate Software, to help your web business earn more money through affiliate network marketing — a mainstay in Internet revenue streams.
Orbit Affiliate Software’s monetization model uses Cost Per Action (CPA) to provide a user action gateway that benefits both web publishers (affiliates) and merchants. CPA offers can include any type of user generated action defined as valuable by merchants: email subscriptions, registrations, pay per sale, pay per lead, clicks, impressions. You decide! With Orbitscripts Affiliate Software sales and lead generation just keeps getting easier.
Let’s look at how affiliate networks operate.
Network Owners – A network owner is sort of like the wizard behind the curtain. An affiliate network owner manages and maintains control over their network of web publishers/affiliate marketers and merchants. When you license your copy of Orbit Affiliate Software, YOU can become an affiliate network owner!
As you are on top of the heap — so to speak — you earn the most money from actions performed by users on your affiliate websites, but you also have certain responsibilities. That’s where we come in. Orbitscripts’ affiliate program software automates everything and brings it all under your control on one easy to use, fully customizable dashboard.
As an affiliate network owner you are responsible for CPA offer payouts to the affiliate websites in your network. With Orbitscripts’ Affiliate Software everything is tracked and managed for you – so no worries there. Our affiliate program software allows you to configure tracking settings, offer fraud protection and maximize ROI using our intelligent reporting tools. There are no limits to the number of merchants or affiliate websites available in your system. Even yourself! If you like, you can also run your own merchant marketing campaigns!
Merchants - Each merchant can set their own fee structures, dates of feeds for promotions and rules for affiliate websites promoting their products. Merchants can set a fixed price or a percentage of system purchases or actions. Orbit Affiliate Software’s merchant panels make it easy to configure and track everything.
Merchants are responsible for paying commissions to their network owner for CPA offers on their affiliates’ websites and for providing marketing materials and handling the business of the transaction; such as product shipping, money collection and customer service – just like any store owner would. What they don’t have to worry about is finding customers, marketing and promoting their product. That’s the affiliate marketers’ job. Merchants simply make their products available, handle their business and sit back while the customers come to them.
Orbit Affiliate Software’s wide variety of innovative ad formats and banner templates make provision and deployment of affiliate marketing materials a snap for both merchant and affiliate.
Affiliates - The bread and butter of the whole shebang, affiliate websites make the online affiliate marketing world go round. They do the work to promote products offered by merchants and/or the network owner. They receive their piece of the pie from the network owner out of the commission paid to them by the merchants. See how that works? Have a look at the diagram below for some visuals on the affiliate marketing ecosystem.
Affiliates entice their website traffic with targeted promotional campaigns offering products of interest to their visitors. Visitors perform actions which generate revenue via CPA offers (subscription, lead generation, sales, registration). Commission on those CPA offers goes to the merchants who pay the network owners who, in turn, pay the affiliates. Got it?
Like everything else, you get back what you put into it. A quality affiliate marketing network takes care of its relationships. With Orbitscripts Affiliate Software, the work is done for you. Our affiliate program software allows you to offer your merchants and publishers smart reporting tools that facilitate strategic promotional campaigns. Quality statistics guide both the affiliate and the merchant in making effective choices. Fee payment is reliable; as it is easily managed and tracked from our customizable owner, merchant and affiliate panels. A variety of user-friendly and engaging promotion formats puts a wide range of affiliate marketing tools in the hands of your marketers and merchants. The rest is gravy!
Stay Tuned for More with Orbitscripts!
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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A wide range of business models and ad formats are taking today’s Internet advertising campaigns by storm. Let’s look at where they are, where they’ve been and most importantly – where they’re headed!
Online Advertising is marketing communication intended to persuade Internet users (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take actions based on content displayed on a website (or webpage) as it relates to products, ideals or services.
Unlike other arenas of advertising, online advertising benefits from a dynamic interactivity between advertisers and consumers. Promoting products and services over the Internet adds the ability to target intended audiences in the context of their interests (contextual advertising) with strategic , interactive delivery across segments such as age, gender, geographic region, day part, and more.
So what can online advertising do for you?
· Attract your visitors’ attention
· Arouse your visitor’s interest
· Compel your visitors to visit your advertiser’s websites
· Impel your visitors to complete actions you intend (this will vary depending on your advertisers’ goals be they to sell products, get users to register their personal information on their website, or subscribe to email lists, etc.).
Evolution in Advertising Industry Business Models
According to the observed behaviors of advertisers in the online market, advertising business models have evolved from CPI (Cost Per Impression) or CPM (Cost Per Mille – 1000 impressions) to CPC (Cost Per click) to CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
The illustration below depicts the shift from CPC to CPA:
Internet Ad Formats Divided into 4 Critical Categories:
- Search ads
- Mobile ads
- Video ads
- Other ads
Text Ads. Advertisements composed of text (displayed largely as sponsored links on search engines), indicated by underlined hyperlinked titles, when clicked, take the user to that advertiser’s website. Text ads are key players in content targeting. Text ads are also generally lower in cost than banners, as they are fairly simple and many websites will accept them.
Banner ads. Ads placed at any point on a web page typically contain text, logos, photographs or other images. Banner ads are priced slightly higher than text ads because they are found to be more effective. Banner ads range from simple pieces of HTML code to multimedia objects developed using technologies like Java, Shockwave and Flash. Banner managers in banner ad software rotate them to keep a site’s content fresh adding content targeting contextual ads into the mix. Banner ads may also include video, sound and animation to pack a more powerful punch.
Rich media. Rich media ads allow advertisers to incorporate multimedia elements such as flash technologies adding sound, animation and post-production type special effects.
Brought about by the increased bandwidth of broadband, rich media ads may lead to higher response rates and better branding capability. Rich media ads certainly offer more creative potential.
A convergence of television and the Internet with interactive advertising is likely to lead to larger budget commitments. The largest advertisers are only just beginning to enter the online fray. New interactive media will likely lead to adjustments in web advertising agency business models, brands, and media choices, in concordance with a new data rich, understanding of consumers online habits. The future of interactive agencies and advertisers must be ROI-driven. Web ad agencies and advertisers must work together in collaborative ad networks to integrate ad campaigns, data, and technology through a variety of new, traditional and hybrid media across geographies and cultures.
In a recent study examining the effects of rich media ads, ads featuring video, on average, appeared to increase purchase intent by 1.16%, compared with a control group that did not see an ad. Compare the effects of videos ads to a simple Flash ad at 0.26%,and we’re seeing a huge difference,
Orbit Ad Server and Orbit Ad Market offer their users the ability to inject content targeting into their ad campaigns that display text ads, image banners and rich media ads.
In-text ads – Contextual ads are where targeted keywords or phrases are highlighted in the body of text on a web page. When users hover their mouse over the keyword/phrase they see an ad appear to arise out of the text. The selling point of this ad delivery format is its relevance to the web page’s content, allowing the ad to target the user’s known interests reaping the benefits of contextual advertising.
At Orbitscripts, we’ve developed a plug-in for In-text ads that allows owners of Orbit Ad Server and Orbit Ad Market to display In-text ads on all of their websites.
Bloggers and website owners earn PPC (pay per click) revenue each time users click a hyperlinked ad. Words and phrase choices are selected by ‘In-text crawler systems and algorithms’ that identify subjects and keywords/phrases as areas of interest within the page. The system then looks for the occurrence of keywords/phrases corresponding to products and services promoted by advertisers and attaches those corresponding ads from its ad network inventory to words and phrases on the page. The users sees the content of an In-text ad in a "tool-tip style balloon" above the keyword. The ad displays when a page visitor passes their mouse over the keyword/phrase.
Pop-up/Pop-under ads. These types of ads open in a new web browser window over (pop-up) or under (pop-under) a website, when the visitor enters the website. You’ve surely run across pop-up advertisements in your travels around the net. Though many people find pop-up advertisement delivery annoying, pop-up/pop-under advertisements are the most noticeable for visitors and are a very efficient way to promote products and services.
OrbitScripts offers highly effective, easily customizable Pop-up/Pop-under advertisement Plug-ins for our two ad management solutions: Orbit Ad Server and Orbit Ad Market.
Floating ads – Rich media ads that appear to float above the content on a web page. Research shows floating ads to be one of the most effective ad delivery formats with some of the highest click through rates (CTR).
OrbitScripts always moves in step with the latest in ad serving technology. As of this writing, we’re developing a plug-in that provides our ad serving software users the ability to offer strategic, content targeted floating ads to their advertisers and publishers.
Floating ads, also known as overlay ads, are rich media ad formats that enable advertisers to serve advertisements that appear uninitiated or superimposed over a user’s requested page. The ads then disappear or become unobtrusive after a specifiable short time period (typically 5-30 seconds).
The most basic floating ads simply appear over the web page, either full screen or in a smaller rectangular window. They may or may not provide a means of escape, such as a close button. More sophisticated versions come in any shape or size and include sound, animation and interactive components.
What Floating Ads Can Do for You:
· Floating Ads are proven to increase brand exposure through the delivery of visually engaging, impactful content that ‘floats’ above your publishers’ web pages. Floating ads add elegance to content targeting in contextual advertising with the graceful way they appear then dissolve. The prevalence of the floating ad in recent years is attributed largely to its high impact.
· Publishers are given full control over their positioning and layering attributes. By specifying screen coordinates and z-index parameter values passed to the Mediaplex ad tag, the publisher can effectively optimize the delivery of the floating ad, so it doesn’t obscure or interfere with their site’s core content and other layered elements.
· Publishers may control the duration of the floating ad to their tastes. This is set as a variable passed on the ad tag.
Expandable ads. Expandable rich media ad formats, allow the dimensions of an ad to expand contingent upon a user action – typically a click or mouse-over. When a user clicks or mouses over an expandable banner the parameters of the ad expand beyond its original space making the ad appear larger, adding real estate value and attention grabbing to the user experience. The expandable banner ad format is rapidly gaining in popularity with both advertisers and publishers.
Orbitscripts does not sit on the sidelines when it comes to delivering the latest in advertising technology to our user base! Keep checking back here for our upcoming announcement of the arrival of a new plug-in we’ve got in development that will put the power of expandable ads in your Orbit Ad Server and Orbit Ad Market online advertising arsenal.
The most common applications expand leaderboard spaces vertically into larger rectangles (i.e. expand from a 90 pixel height to a 500 pixel height.) or expand 250×300 rectangle spaces horizontally into larger rectangles (expansion from a 300 pixel width to a 600 pixel width). Lots of other implementations are also possible with the expandable ad format.
Expandable Ads and You:
· Get more ad space to share interactive experiences and content targeted information with your advertiser’s audience.
· Support the inclusion of any number of rich media ad features, including video within a single ad unit.
· Allow your advertisers to measure the number of ad expansions and the amount of time the ad is expanded, in addition to common metrics available to all Mediaplex Rich Media ad formats.
Video ads. Video advertising really speaks for itself. According to market statistics, users click video ads 10 times more frequently than your average banner ad! Who doesn’t love video? Video ads grab visitors’ attention and hold it while your message is delivered, increasing demand for your advertisers products or services.
One big word: Youtube.
Online video is forever increasing in popularity with viewers and TV companies are starting to realize there’s a real need for a cross-platform strategy. The days when television was all there is and was more than enough to captivate an audience are well and truly over.
From a fiscal standpoint, Internet video ads will only truly take off when media, TV, and cable companies embrace it as an alternative to traditional television. But for that to happen, there has to be a profit in it. Can Web Television ever compete with traditional TV when it comes to ad revenue?
We’re working to bring video module creation to your Orbit Ad Market and Orbit Ad Server systems. We stand strong on our commitment to keep our ad serving and ad network platforms on the leading edge of ad serving technology. Bookmark this blog for an announcement of our new video module creation plug-in coming soon!
Mobile Ads
Internet users are just not sitting inside on their butts in front of their screens any more. Butts and screens are on the move with today’s smart phones, ipads, tablets, ebook readers, laptops, mini-notebooks, netbooks – you name it! Thanks to the plethora of mobile devices available, the PC is on its way to being at least a secondary point of access. As always, form follows function. Consumers look to the Internet to stay wired to the world – for news and information and ever increasingly for entertainment and staying tapped into their social networks. Make sure your mobile ads go where they go.
Mobile Advertising isn’t just driven by mobile display ads. Text messaging is creating a new marketing opportunity to reach mobile users and your potential clients.
Data already shows higher response and conversion rates from Mobile Advertising. eMarketer’s forecast mobile ad delivery to hit $1 Billion by 2011 and that looks just about right on target. Are you going to be a part of it?
Stay tuned with OrbitScripts!
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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The Internet advertising market is growing. There’s no doubt about that. The annual amount spent for online advertising in the US climbs higher every year. The latest research from eMarketer.com indicates numbers will top 40 billion dollars in 2014. That’s twice as high as 2009 ad management expenditures, up from 22.7 billion.
Pessimistic analysts and Internet naysayers predicted a decrease in online ad revenues in tandem with the generalized global economic decline. They were wrong. Instead, in 2010, money spent on online advertising has increased by 13.9%. That’s 25.8 billion dollars, in spite of forecasted advertising campaign budget reductions.
So why are we watching online advertising budgets rise while everything else plummets? The answer is pretty simple actually; the number of consumers flocking to the Internet continues to expand. As Internet usage grows, so do ad conversions giving rise to more ad campaigns to reach deeper into the pockets of new audiences.
2010 saw 221 million people surf the Internet on a weekly basis. That’s about 2/3 of the US population (71%). And it ain’t gonna stop there! eMarket researchers project that by 2014, the number of Internet users will climb as high 250 million upping online advertising stakes to more than 77% of the people living in the US.
Sure the Internet is not the only place to run ads, so how are traditional ad markets like print, television and radio faring, as the US increasing turns to the Internet for news and entertainment? In the pie chart below showing total ad delivery, Internet advertising slices out 17.7% of total ad spending, exceeding monies spent on print ads, OOH (out-of-home, billboards, store signs, etc.) and other ad delivery formats. Still, television still holds on with twice the pie spent on Internet ad campaigns.
Money spent on Internet and print ads were almost equal in 2010. It seems though, according to eMarket forecasts, the gap between online media spending and that spent on print media will widen. Spending on print media is predicted to fall when online ads expenditures reach their forecasted height of 28.5 billion dollars in the 2011. Writer’s Market Yearbook 2011, a magazine that closely follows the print publishing industry, reports a continuing trend of print magazines closing up shop due to dips in ad revenue, as ebooks, epublishing and the Internet gain audience attention and market share.
Traditionally, the biggest chunks of ad budgets are spent on expensive ad delivery formats on television. In 2010, the high cost of television advertising accounted for 43.7% of total ad spending. However, experts expect that figure to decline as demand grows for Internet advertising aimed at expanding audiences there. Current figures show more people turn on their computer rather than the television, when it’s time to sit down for a little news and entertainment. 2010‘s average U.S. citizen spent more time surfing the net than television channels with 13.3 hours of weekly webbing compared to television’s 11.3 weekly hours’ viewing time. When asked, more than a third of Internet users report they watch less TV and read fewer newspapers and magazines.
One of the major benefits of Internet versus television advertising comes with the Internet’s inherently broader creative license. Internet advertisers don’t have to follow format restrictions, content regulations or air-time constraints. From these freedoms, businesses and users benefit from more innovative advertising campaigns.
Online spending will far outpace increases in total media spending, which is predicted to inch upward by 1.2% next year after rising 3% in 2010. In 2014, ad analysts predict total media ad spending will hit $188.5 billion, up from $168.5 billion this year.
Folks, it looks like the jury is in and the verdict is ever expanding Internet audiences are what’s keeping the advertising industry afloat in these hard economic times. Internet users propel growth in budgetary spending for online ad campaigns where the heaviest hitters are the increasingly popular technologies of rich media ads.
Paid search’s portion of online ad spending will continue to hover in the 40% range through 2011. Paid search takes the lion’s share of Internet ad spending.
Display ads (like static ad banners, for instance) will comprise about 20% of Internet ad revenue total for the decade.
Classified ads, including those on newspaper sites and in places such as eBay, Monster.com or HotJobs, will average out at about 17%.
Rich media ads, which include video advertising, looks to be the rising star shooting up from 8% market share this year to over 13% in 2011.
Overall, advertisers spent $37.5 billion for online advertising in 2010. Internet ad industry analysts forecast that by the year’s end, 2011 spending for online advertising will reach $42 billion.
Stay tuned for our next post, where we examine detailed statistics and trends for different Internet ad formats.
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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System performance matters in today’s nano attention span market where someone else’s website is only a quick click away. Your servers are the backbone of your Internet business. When your customers tell them to jump, you want your servers to already know how high.
A server’s performance is largely dependent on its configuration, server settings, and of course on the software installed there. Situations arise where the server can’t handle the load generated by user demands. For example, in an ad serving context, the server gets overloaded by a high volume of ad impressions and generates an error message that says, “Nope. Can’t cope.” Then both the application AND the server crash. No fun.
So here are a few tips to optimize your servers and keep ‘em jumpin’:
1. The most obvious solution is choose wisely: choose scalability. Go for servers and applications that can handle a large load and that can be configured to work with multiple servers on your network. One of the advantages of scalability of servers is that, if necessary, if the server load is increased again; you can always add another web server. However, be sure to think through the constraints and requirements of your web applications as not all apps can scale without requiring additional modification.
2. Make sure your web servers are designed to handle large numbers of queries and conserve server resources. We have a lot of experience with the different servers out there. We recommend using Nginx over Apache. Nginx consumes significantly less resources and runs much faster than Apache. If the web applications you use require an Apache server (for example using a URL Rewriting Engine) and you can’t modify it; you can use a mix of Nginx and Apache, so you still get the speed and the resource allocation efficiency of Nginx.
3. Use data caching on servers that take up a lot of computational resources. Caching eliminates repeating unnecessary computations freeing up precious resources for higher productivity. In caching systems, we like Memcached. Memcached stores all the data in the server’s memory giving you high speed writing and reading.
4. Take care to optimize for your customer base. Reduce the number of requests to web servers (combine JavaScript and CSS files into one) and use HTML page compression (standard web servers tools should do it) to heighten server performance.
5. Configure your database to fit the individual needs of a project and the software it runs. This will again save critical resources and eliminate unnecessary operations related to the database. We also recommend you allocate a separate server for the databases you use to streamline processes and increase the speed of your system.
6. Disable unnecessary processes when you can. Don’t over tax your server with unnecessary processes you’re not using that often. For example, if the server is not scheduled to send out a mass email newsletter, you can safely disable POP, IMAP and SMTP services in the mean time.
We hope that this helps keep you and your servers online and high gear!
Stay tuned for more with OrbitScripts!
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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Check it! We’ve got a hot, fresh new product for you! The even better news? It’s free! We’ve released Orbit Open Ad Server and it’s now available free for download.
With Orbit Open Ad Server you can advertise on any website on the Internet and earn money doing it – with no up front monetary investment on your part. Why? We’d like you to try it. We’d like to invite you into our family of products that help users all over the world expand their online businesses by gaining the advantage of audience targeted ads in a global marketplace.
To download Orbit Open Ad Server, go to the spot marked “Download” and fill out a quick form with your real email address – you know, the one you check – and we’ll send you a link in an email that takes you to where you can download Orbit Open Ad Server – free!
To get everything setup: Download the archive to your server and run install.php. Follow the instructions in our Installation Wizard, to correctly install the Orbit Open Ad Server to your server or hosting. And voila! You’re ready to serve context relevant ads and make money.
Oh! Also! Be sure to register with our ByteCity Network. ByteCity gives you immediate access to a wide range of quality advertisers in the broad ByteCity Network. Use ByteCity to supplement your current network of advertisers or let ByteCity introduce you to a whole world of diverse advertisers; so you can begin displaying ads on your site right away!
Orbit Open Ad Server lets you reach out to your network with several user-friendly methods such as email newsletters, targeted ad placements, thirty party site ads, offline advertising, etc. Our customers have gotten great results displaying ads from ByteCity and third party ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publishers, AdBrite, etc.
We built Orbit Open Ad Server using open source code in PHP and Javascript with a MySQL database. The open source model lets you tailor & tweak to fit your business. Use it as a simple banner serving app or as a complex advertising portal.
Please Note: Orbit Open Ad Server was built for expert developers and highly technical enthusiasts developing for non-mission critical environments. In other words, you gotta have skillz to modify PHP scripts. Be careful out there!
Good luck! Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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Before you buy something – you need to try it, right? Therefore, we developed the Lite version of our product Orbit AdServer – Orbit Open Ad Server, that soon would be available for download from our site.
You would be able to download and install it yourself to your server or hosting.
Orbit Open Ad Server is a free open source solution that will allow you to place ads on your web sites and monetize your traffic to earn money.
This ad serving platform has limited functionality compared to the Orbit AdServer, but you’ are more the welcome to upgrade it to Orbit AdServer solution anytime.
Orbit Open Ad Server is an open source solution with open source, you can modify it yourself to fit your needs.
One of the most attractive features of the Orbit Open Ad Server is that it will have a built in XML feed from our advertising network ByteCity. Thus, you will have access to a large network of advertisers ByteCity and can start earning money.
On Orbit Open Ad Server you can mix the ads! Receive advertising from major advertisers, network ByteCity and place it on your sites, mixing it with ads from your own advertisers and third-party advertising networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publishers, etc.
If your site is built on a popular CMS system like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress, you can easily place ads on them with Orbit Open Ad Server by built-in CMS modules.
With Orbit Open Ad Server you can mix and place ads on your sites and make a modification of the script in according to your business requirements.
Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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Video advertising is one of the most effective and popular ad types on the Internet. Video ad is a short video that has useful information about the product or service offered by an advertiser.
So we decided to concentrate on creating a video module for our main platform. As usual, we use the latest technology to develop it.
Video Module will include two types of video advertising: in-banner and in-steam video ads.
Banner advertising is a new type of advertising that allows users of your system to place video ads in the site channels.
An in-Steam video ad is an ad that can appear in the video clip before the show, during the show or after the show. In-Steam video advertising can be divided into several types:
Pre- rolls – promotional video that shows ads before the main content Mid – rolls – ads displayed in the middle of main content Post- rolls – ads displayed after the main content Overlays – advertising (text ads, graphical banners, rich media and flash-banners) that is shown in parallel with the main content. Video Module of Orbit system will include an embedded player, that can be used in two types of players: JW Player and Flow Player.
In addition to the embedded player, users of the system also can use third-party video player that supports VAST standard.
We are developing a video module, taking into account not only of modern technologies and standards, but the convenience of its use for our customers that will use it in a wide variety of videos to achieve maximum results.
The next step in expanding our products would be creating ad module for mobile phones.
Stay tuned! Note: This article is a cross-post from OrbitScripts Blog.
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