Posts Tagged ‘Adgator’

Posted on February 18, 2010 - by Justin Hartman

My presentation at the Addynamo Blogging Workshop

If you missed it, here’s my presentation from the Addynamo Blogging Workshop that I did yesterday. There are some interesting Adgator insights which haven’t been seen before.

 

Posted on October 22, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

I’ve made it to the finals

I love a good competition. Nothing like the thrill of the chase to drive one nuts. If you’re reading this blankly then let me elaborate by saying that I am now one of two finalists in the $3,000 adtech content revenue strategies giveaway which includes a trip to New York to attend the conference.

This is something I really, really want and I am forced to rely on you to help me get what I want. Basically it’s now down to public voting and your vote will determine who gets to go. Please can you head on over to Shoemoney’s blog by clicking this link and cast your vote for Justin in the vote box?

Voting ends on Friday morning and I’m competing against a really great guy so your vote is important and really will help to make a difference.

I must thank everyone who’s voted for me so far. The support has been amazing from you all – thank you!

 

Posted on October 18, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

ad:tech, Adgator and me – it’s the perfect fit

Jeremy Schoemaker who runs the blog Shoemoney is offering one person an all-expenses paid opportunity to attend ad:tech New York in early November. Now I’m not big on entering many competitions but attending ad:tech is something that is critical to me and my business. In addition to attending the ad:tech conference there is also a pass to attend Content Revenue Strategies (formerly Adspace) where Jeremy is going to be speaking and you get to have lunch with the man himself.

So why is this important to me and my business and why do I feel that I should attend over all the other potential candidates? Well there are two main reasons which I’ll highlight below.

Adgator – Africa’s first blog advertising network

Afrigator, the company I co-founded and now the largest niche aggregator in Africa, pioneered the first blog advertising network on the continent called Adgator. We launched Adgator almost a year ago and we’ve had some great response and varying success. In particular, what I’ve noticed is that we’ve solved a critical need to connect advertisers with bloggers (vice-versa) and for the first time there is a simple solution for brands to advertise and communicate to a social media audience in Africa.

While we’ve certainly solved many problems we are the first to market and this has come at a hefty price. There have been huge learning curves for us and as the market isn’t as big as say the U.S. we’ve had to be disruptive in our innovation in order to succeed. For me ad:tech would help us to learn from people a whole lot smarter than us, connect with highly influential people in the market and ultimately give us valuable insight into the state of play.

All of this will help us apply what we’ve learned and the insight we’ve gained to a market that we ultimately understand. I’d imagine that attending this conference would leap-frog our business to a completely new level and this is critical to our survival.

Working with the U.S. Government

Back in August 2009 we were contacted by the U.S. Government and together we formed an interesting partnership. We worked very closely with the Department of State, the SA Embassy as well as America.gov to assist them in showcasing the work the U.S. is doing in Africa.

Together we launched a pioneering social stream in time for Sec. Hillary Clinton’s seven nation trip to Africa and not only did this showcase official content from America.gov but it also showcased the conversation happening in real-time across all the social media platforms. We’ve long built up a relationship with African bloggers and content producers and it’s relatively easy for us to pull all of this together and we aggregated everything from Afrigator (i.e. blog posts), Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Delicious that related to Sec Clinton’s trip.

As a result of our very close connection with the U.S. I think it’s imperative that I finally get the opportunity to visit the land of the free as I’ve never been to the U.S. before. As America continues its mission in Africa and we continue to work with the U.S. Government it would be hugely beneficial to understand both markets and not just the one we live in.

So, Jeremy, you could possibly chose someone else but I think your best candidate is staring you squarely in the eyes.

 

Posted on November 28, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

88% of SA Bloggers make no money

Alistair, the brains behind the SA Blog Survey, sent me a very interesting slide yesterday about the revenue that bloggers earn from their blogs. As most of you will know Afrigator was proud to be associated with the 24.com SA Blog survey and according to Alistair there were over 1,000 responses to the survey.

I think this is a pretty good response rate, all things considered, but for me the interesting bit was seeing that 88.4% of SA bloggers earn zero revenue from their blogs while the additional 11.6% earn no more than R3,000 a month.

As you can see, of the people who do earn money, the average a blogger makes is between R1 and R200 a month. 24.com have said that “blogging for the most part is not about making money” but I have to wonder if this isn’t because there hasn’t really been a viable method to earn revenue from blogs.

I have believed for a long time that bloggers don’t make money from their blogs not out of choice but simply because there hasn’t been a model that is tailored to them. I speak from experience since I’ve tried Google Adsense, Affiliate Marketing and various other forms of revenue generation and to be honest getting a cheque from Google once every six months for R750 just doesn’t cut it for me.

Most blogs don’t generate that much traffic so PPC and CPA are models that simply don’t work. These are great revenue streams if you’re generating 1 million plus impressions but if you’re only doing 5,000 it becomes a lot more difficult to make any real money.

I think this slide further validates my position on launching Adgator into the SA market. As with Afrigator, everything we’ve done has been based on our own personal experiences and Adgator is no different. There is a lot of money being thrown around in online advertising and I think it’s time bloggers shared in the revenue.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t like advertising that much and the thought of bombarding my limited readership with dodgy ads is not something I take lightly however I do feel that if the value proposition is right then I’d be happy to dedicated a spot on my site. If I can truly see earning potential then I’d take the plunge because R750 a month is a lot better than R750 every six.

Adgator has been doing phenomenally well since we launched it some two weeks ago and the good news for bloggers and advertisers is that we’ve just finished building the backend interfaces. This means bloggers and advertisers who’ve shown an interest and/or signed up will be getting login details to monitor their earnings and track campaigns.

Adgator has been an unbelievable learning experience. While we may have honestly believed we were ready for a launch I know now that there was no way we could have prepared ourselves for the massive uptake of the program. That said, the technology is now complete, we have most of the data we need and we have an exciting advertiser coming on board from 8 December. Money will start to filter through to the bloggers who’ve signed up and the earning potential is going to increase considerably in the new year.

I know that guys have itchy feet but in the coming months the average money earned by a blogger through Adgator is going to be a lot higher than R200! I can’t wait to see the blog survey stats this time next year…

 

Posted on November 11, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Adgator – Africa’s First Blog Advertising Network

In December 2007 I did a presentation at 27dinner in Jo’burg where I previewed the first Beta version of Afrigator. Most people at the time thought we were going to announce an acquisition but alas it really was just geeky from start to end.

One of the key points I raised in the presentation (sideshow here, video here) was that we were going to implement a revenue model for the website and in turn share the revenue with the bloggers. Ramon was the first person to ask how we planned on doing this but at the time we were still unclear as to the model and in truth it’s taken us almost 11 months to figure this one out.

Enter Adgator – a newly launched product, under the Afrigator stable, that links our blogging network to advertisers and helps to monetise blogs in a way that Google Adsense and other forms of online marketing simply can’t do.

The more I’ve been watching the collective growth of our network the more I’ve come to realise just how powerful blogs are in relation to other traditional websites. As an example, the top 100 blogs in South Africa (as measured by Afrigator) account for more than 1.7 million unique users and serves over 5.6 million page views each month.

This makes the network as powerful in terms of audience reach to South Africa’s #1 local website, News24, which also serves around 1.7 million uniques each month ~ (Nielsen Netratings – Q2 June 2008).

The scary part for me is that more than 1,200 blogs registered on Afrigator haven’t implemented our tracking code so they can’t be added to these figures and if you had to add them to the mix I have little doubt the network would look a whole lot different.

So, with a total network cap of 3.2 million unique users and 7.9 million page views I’ve often wondered how we can use this network to all of our advantage and I believe Adgator is the answer to this pondering.

The concept of Adgator is simple. Sign up as a blogger, insert a piece of code into your blog theme and we’ll go out and find advertisers who are willing to spend money. Each time a blogger sees one of our ads on their website they know that they’ve made money. Initially we’ll be sticking to a CPM model because that’s what advertisers understand and we will share 50% of the revenue with bloggers.

This model means that a blog serving as little as 2,500 page views a month can make R300 for doing nothing and if you’re lucky enough to be a high-traffic blog your earnings could be as high as six figures. Our aim with Adgator is to be as transparent as possible and all blog owners will have their own access to our system so they can track their earnings in real time. In our reporting we break down cost, revenue share and total income so the blogger knows exactly who’s getting what.

As an advertiser or media planner the value proposition is easy to quantify. Without realising it at the time Afrigator has been indexing, filtering, categorising and profiling blogs in a way that is perfectly tailored for this business model. Instead of throwing a banner up on a major traffic website we can now offer real, targeted advertising to markets and audiences that fit an advertisers’ needs perfectly.

Adgator excites me in a way I can’t describe. The possibilities are endless really but to start off we’ve invited 100 of SA’s top blogs to the network for a pilot program. Invitations were sent this morning and we’re in the process of finalising some exciting advertisers that will really compliment the product and blogs that the creatives appear on.

In the first quarter of 2009 we plan to implement this blog ad network in Kenya and Nigeria so watch this space for more details on these announcements.

If you’re a South African blogger and you didn’t get an invite but want to be a part of the network please visit the site and sign up. We’re certainly not going to limit the network to 100 blogs and the quicker we can build the network the better.

I’m sure you’ll have some questions, please feel free to ask me anything…