Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

AdSense vs. Cubics: Two Weeks Later

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Here’s how the AdSense experiement on Facebook went:

AdSense eCPM: $0.35 (ranging from $0.02 to $1.60)
Cubics CPM (Average): $0.70 (minimum $0.67 to maximum $0.74)

Take Cubics, play safe, or take AdSense and try to maximize clicks in whatever way you can.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media | No Comments »

Yahoo: One Giant Social Network?

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Yahoo

If this bit of information is anything to go by, the social networking bubble is either bordering on the edge of being ridiculous, or Yahoo might be on to something.

Yahoo are looking a little stagnant, and a switch to social media might create the largest social network overnight. On the other hand, if implemented poorly, Yahoo will keep going down the drain. With 500 million active users compared to MySpace’s 110m and Facebook’s 60m, Yahoo will automatically get the largest userbase in no time at all.

This represents the first time a major force is switching to the social format rather than experimenting with smaller projects like Orkut or the now dysfunctional MyWallop. Open application development is also on offer, so this might as well become much bigger than Facebook or MySpace, if they do it right!

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Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Experimenting with AdSense on Facebook

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Monetizing Facebook applications is a difficult job. First, there’s no dominant ad network for Facebook. I’ve started experimenting with AdSense on some pages of my Indian Premier League application. Here are some things I’ve learn so far:

  1. AdSense provides relevant content if the web-page can be crawled. That’s why I built my app in such a way that certain pages can be crawled and others not. There are ways of getting around this such as nesting the ad code in iFrames with dummy text, but that probably borders right on the edge of Google’s TOS. Point is, if your page is open to crawlers, you will get relevant ads.
  2. Selectively use require_login() and require_add(). This comes from the point above. The index.php file on my application uses require_add() so 92% of people using my app have added it. Most of the other pages are open to the web.
  3. AdSense = CPC + CPM. Most Facebook ad networks such as Cubics or Adblade are exclusively CPC or exclusively CPM. AdSense is a combination of both, and the publisher cannot control the ratio in which these ads are shown, so you have to trust Google to deliver. Here are the facts about AdSense’s CPM.
  4. You will get less clicks on Facebook as compared to a website. Most people on Facebook stick on Facebook and aren’t easily interested in going away. Pray to God for more CPM ads.

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Posted in Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Optimizing Advertising for Social Networks

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

This comes from an interesting post by Jesse Farmer. There is no clear winner amongst ad networks for social applications on Facebook, MySpace, etc. The only real way to know is to find out for yourself.

Using PHP, you can randomly show ad codes from multiple ad networks with equal probability. Check the cash and find out which works best for you!

function get_random_ad_code() {
    $ad_codes = array(
        'lookery'     => 'Your Lookery ad code',
        'adblade'     => 'Your AdBlade ad code',
        'socialmedia' => 'Your SocialMedia ad code',
        'rockyou'     => 'Your RockYou ad code'
    );

    return $ad_codes[array_rand($ad_codes)];
}

echo get_random_ad_code();

If you want to take it to the next level, you can write more complex algorithms to weigh the ads in favor of the network that works best for you, but that’s outside the scope of this article (for now.)

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Posted in Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Media | 4 Comments »