Afrigator Blog

Yesterday morning I was interviewed for the Unzipped Podcast on Fin24.com. In the interview with Simon Dingle we covered topics that included:

• What Afrigator is
• Blogging trends across Africa
• Afrigator revenue streams, Adgator & Google Adsense
• Integration with the 24.com Blogging platform
• Membership to the Online Publishers Association (OPA)

To listen to the podcast (only 6 minutes 30 seconds long) you can click on the image below or alternatively click here to be taken to the podcast page.

We’ve been throwing the term “verticals” around at the Adgator offices and on our site for the last while now. Verticals are great, especially for Adgator, but loads of people have been going “psssst – what exactly is it?” So I figure that a quick post will clear verticals up for everybody.

One of the really cool things about Adgator is our ability to tell what it is that you’re blogging about. We do this using our top secret algorithms and a little bit of baking powder. Anyway, once we’ve figured out what exactly it is that you’re passionately blogging about, we try and assign it to a category. We call these categories verticals.

We have four main verticals on the Adgator network – Lifestyle, Technology, Entertainment and Business. So your blog will fall in to one of these four verticals. We spend a lot of time figuring out which blogs will fit best in to which categories to make sure that you get the right kind of advertising on your blog.

Each vertical also has a number of sub verticals, which let us narrow down your content a little further for advertisers who would like to target very specific types of blog. Here you can see the sub-verticals we’ve used in the Lifestyle vertical.

When an advertiser comes to Adgator to book a campaign, chances are that they have a very specific audience in mind for their campaign (we hope that they do!). So they select a vertical (or verticals) that they would like to target. Let’s create an example.

If an advertiser selects all the blogs in the Technology vertical, this means that bloggers in this vertical will see paid ads. If your blog is in the Entertainment vertical and there are currently no paid ads in that vertical (or only a portion of the inventory has been booked) chances are you’ll see one of our famous Adgator placeholder ads. This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with your blog or your code or that we think you smell funny. It just means that we don’t have an ad for you right now.

The good news is that the team here at the Gator Pen is hard at work finding advertisers to suit your blog (and your pocket) so before too long you’ll see ads all the time. And make money all the time.

I hope that this post has shed a little more light on the way that Adgator works and disspelled those nasty rumours saying that we don’t like you. If you have any more questions, drop them in the comments below and we’ll be sure to answer to the best of our ability.

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,

Lester

huh?

Ok, ok I’ll stop with the funny looking words now. For the last few weeks, we’ve been quite a busy bunch here at the Gator Pen. With the launch of Adgator, the AfriGreater campaign and my never ending bid to get Justin to buy a new coffee machine, things have been moving along at Cape Town wind speed.

One of the cool things we’re happy to announce is Afrigator’s new look. While it’s not a major change it’s pretty significant to us so we want to share it with you. I won’t list all of the changes here, but even just the major ones are pretty nice.

Seek and we shall find

Our new search logic is Stii’s pride and joy. In the previous version of Afrigator search was trusty and reliable, but not the fastest in the world. Sort of like an old 1600 Corolla. Stii’s new and improved Sphinx Search cuts the average search time from 4s to roughly 0.01s. So now you can find what you want a lot faster (just be careful of speeding fines).

Even cooler than the speed is the integration of search on your home page. When you visit Afrigator, you’ll see media relative to your last 2 search results. So if you were searching for Gummy Bears on your last visit, we’ll go find the info on Gummy Bears and include these on your home page next time you log in. It’s all about returning relevant results.

Local is better </ cliche>

When you visit the site from a country in Africa you’ll see results relevant to your country. Previously, you would have seen all the latest entries regardless of where you live, but this way you can find results a little closer to home.

You still have the option of viewing the content from all over Africa, all you need to do is go here and select which countries you would like to view on your home page.

Snap Happy

Personally, this is my favourite new section on the site – the inclusion of aggregated images on your home page. Africa has amazing scenes captured by amazing photographers, and now there’s a simple way to find and view these photographs.

Just like with the blog posts, you will see the latest images from your country and like with blogs you have the option to view all of the amazig images from Africa. If you use Flickr and would like us to aggregate your images, simply tag them with “south” and “africa” (two seperate tags) or “nigeria”, “kenya” (depending which country they come from) and we’ll include them in the photo results.

My Gator (well technically it’s Your Gator)

MyGator is the easy way to keep tabs on your favourite blogs in Afrigator (sort of like Google Reader does). Using MyGator is simple – when you find blog that you enjoy reading, simply click on the title of the blog and choose to follow it.

Stii’s busy working on an even easier way to follow your favourite bloggers in MyGator, but more on that next time around. I’m a little out of breath from all this copying and pasting, these images are heavy.

As always, we want to hear from you – after all, Afrigator is your service and this is your community. So please drop us a comment if you think of any other ways that you think we can make Afrigator better, we’d really love to know.

Till next time, keep on blogging,

Lester