top header bg Adgator, when will it turn on?Adgator is a unique blog advertising network tailored specifically for South Africa. This network of blogs, while small in individual reach, is extremely powerful as a combined force and Adgator helps monetise your blog in a way that simply was not possible before.

Sounds great right? The first South African advertising network for bloggers. No more paypal issues, lost cheques and other such issues. We’ve been signed up pretty much since they were accepting registration and served a couple of ads (and made a bit of money) through their service when The Times Mobile campaign was live. This campaign was paused during the December break and was said to have made a come back Thursday the 15th of Jan (15/01/2009).

The first paid campaign kicked off in December (Times Mobile) and it was met with some relative success. There were some teething problems that we had to iron out but we think we’ve managed to use that experience to iron out all the bugs.
As many will know the Times Mobile campaign took a short holiday and the second part of the campaign will kick off again on Thursday 15 January. We are awaiting final creatives and then we’ll set it all up.

Launching any kind of business or service is always tricky at the end of the year as companies close shop and are not really into starting up new campaigns etc., but Adgator managed to land the campaign and things looked promising.
A newsletter was sent out to all members detailing the return of The Times campaign as well as 2 other campaigns which were also said to go live on the 13th and 15th respectively. I do not mean to sound pushy at all, but what happened? Today is the 16th and nothing but their ad is showing. I’ve checked on a few other blogs and it’s the same there, no ads.
Their blog doesn’t give any details on what is happening and it’s making me nervous, maybe someone else has the inside scoop? I’ve gone to the blogs [iMod, stii, Justin Hartman] I would think would have some sort of news, and nothing.
Hopefully it’s nothing too serious and the campaigns will startup soon and the service will grow from strength to strength (which I’m sure it will).
UPDATE
Adgator have made a blog post explaining how they categorize blogs.
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.
There’s also a little banner when you log into your Dashboard giving some info into the campaigns that were supposed to start up
For those of you waiting for the new Times Mobile and our third campaign to kick off we apologise for the delay. We are awaiting final graphics for banners from both clients and as soon as we have them the campaigns will go live.

So, even when they have advertisers you may not show their ads if your blog doesn’t fall into the same “vertical” as the campaign. This is understandable, advertising is a targeted tool and there is no point in trying to sell a product to people that are not interested in it at all. If the blog is about cooking and babies, it’s unlikely anyone would click an advert for Monster Truck racing.

Thanks for the update guys!
Adgator, when will it turn on?

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