Hey, you – where’s my Times mobile ad?
You signed up to Adgator, grabbed your new ad code from your dashboard, popped it on your blog and then eagerly hit refresh. Then, nothing. Still the same Adgator ad. But why? What’s wrong? Is the code broken?!! What about that boat you wanted to buy with your Adgator fortune? Help!
Luckily, the answer to these questions is very simple: Everything is alright 
With Adgator we’ve built up quite a fair sized network of blogs, and between the lot of you we have loads and loads of impressions (or page views) that we can sell to advertisers. Now when an advertiser comes up to us to buy some ads, they don’t necessarily buy all of these impressions. They buy a certain number over a set time period. So as an example….
- Adgator has 10000 ads to sell (for example)
- An advertiser buys 1000 of those ads.
- So, we serve a small portion of those 1000 ads every hour to make sure that we don’t blow all the impressions in one day (or one hour).
- Theoretically, 1 in every 10 people will see the Advertiser ad, the rest will see an Adgator place holder.
So, when we’re not serving an Advertiser ad, you’ll see and Adgator ad. This will change as we get more advertisers on board and there are less ‘empty’ spots left. Make sense?
Here’s a comment that Justin left on Chris Mills’ Imod blog:
“A lot of questions have been asked as to why The Times’ ads are only displaying once every now and again and not all the time. The answer is really simple. The Times only booked a portion of the network traffic which we have to distribute evenly over a fixed time period. This means we only serve a small portion every hour so that we can serve the ads over a fixed time period rather than all at once. If we served it all at once there wouldn’t be any ads left after Day 1. The key here is for us to sell more ads ”
And here’s my technical explanation of the process:
I hope that this post clears things up a bit and that you’ll now have an even better Adgator experience.
Till next time, keep on blogging,
Arné said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 15:52
Perfect, and totally understandable – and hopefully the Adgator ads will get us some more advertisers!!
Come on friendly advertisers, come on sponsor us!!!!
Chris M said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:12
Things will get really exciting once all your impressions are paid for – That’s when bloggers will be begging to sign up with Adgator.
Come on Lester, give us a ETA on an affiliate program
Robin said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:22
Haha – The technical explination rocks! ROAR!
Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:30
@Chris – Affiliate program: Bring us an advertiser and you get a commission. ETA – right now! Blogger ETA – not sure on that one yet
Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:31
@Robin, you have to love pics with Gators in them
Chris M said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:32
Lol, bummer, well I guess I’ll continue to wait, now is the perfect time for us bloggers to be able to refer new people!
Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:33
@Chris – I’ll keep you posted. BTW you still owe me an email with links!!!
Chris M said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 16:34
Oooooh ya, it’s taking me quite some time to think about it isn’t it
Arné said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 17:04
I also guess it is a hard time of the year for companies to fork out money for new campaign, probably only after the Christmas/New Year 2 weeks.
I hope the Times campaign hold till after.
Chris M said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 17:05
Spot on Arne, this is the worst time of the year, departing with huge budgets is near impossible, but Jan will be here soon and I’m sure things will rock then!
Justin Hartman said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 17:07
Spot on Arne – it was actually a very bad time of year to launch Adgator – there goes that damn hindsight again
The Times campaign will pause briefly over the festive season but will resume again in January. We’re hoping though to close a few more deals which we’ve been working on before the end of the year so we should have a few advertisers running over the festive season.
No promises but hold thumbs!!!
Arné said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 17:13
@Justin – well – I remember last year around Christmas that my blog really got very little traffic over the week and a half anyway, and if this year is gonna be the same, then it should not be a big train smash.
Good luck on those deals that you wanna clinch before year end though!
Norio said,
Wrote on December 11, 2008 @ 21:59
Thanks for the explanation, I WAS wondering
Really enjoying the earnings. Really hope the AdGator ads will help get more advertisers!!
What we need is press coverage for AdGator. Maybe something like, “Bloggers Getting Xmas Bonus from AdGator”
How’s that for awesome?
Johan Swarts said,
Wrote on December 16, 2008 @ 21:26
Whoohoo!!!
Added my banking details just now. You guys r0x
sameh said,
Wrote on January 11, 2009 @ 16:40
Thanks for the explanation, I WAS wondering Really enjoying the earnings. Really hope the AdGator ads will help get more advertisers!!
What we need is press coverage for AdGator. Maybe something like, “Bloggers Getting Xmas Bonus from AdGator” How’s that for awesome?