Adgator, when will it turn on?

16 Jan

Posted by docmoo as Blogging, Web

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!

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7 Responses

Arné

January 16th, 2009 at 6:23 pm

I also found that I started earning for about 3 days and then it stopped since around yesterday afternoon. So far I’m not too nervous, but if it rolls over to next week I hope there is gonna be some news then.
fx

January 16th, 2009 at 11:18 pm

Also – we loaded it up across multiple blogs after being told its coming live; now we’ve only wasted ad space giving them free advertising :/
Steven

January 17th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

I’ve been following this service since its first announcement and was rather intrigued at the idea of another online advertising solution for South Africans, however, until it actually serves ads using a locally hosted solution, there’s nothing unique about it. In that case, it is competing with the likes of Google Adwords, and there’s no doubt who the winner of that is.
fx

January 17th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

Hmm that’s a good point actually; it hadn’t occurred to me yet whether ads where served locally..

We host our blog internationally though so I suppose it wouldn’t make much difference for us.. but certainly for local sites it might
docmoo

January 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm

Local sites these days use a myriad of services that are hosted internationally. Buying yourself a local internet package from an ISP lets you get to these sites, but you often find yourself waiting ages for the page to load anyway because things like Google Analytics and internationally hosted 3rd party services.

A quick whois on the Adgator domain shows it is indeed hosted internationally.

Personally I don’t believe they are competing with Adwords. The structure that they have chosen puts them as a private ad agency whereby the user (that’s us) approaches them to get advertising for their blog and they go find companies who are wanting to run an online campaign.

Personally I thought they would go the TLA route where their inventory would be searchable and anyone would be able to get an advert out there whether they are spending R10 or R10,000.

This is not a bash on the technique they have chosen, I just would’ve thought they would have made it as easy for people wanting to advertise as it is for those wanting to show the adverts.
Lester Hein

January 19th, 2009 at 12:50 pm

@docmoo
Great post, thanks for the support. We’re working on growing and improving the service, so your gripes and bugbears will be addressed as we move through our dev list ;)

@ Steven
Adgator offers both user and advertisers something different to what Google Ads do. Firstlty, we split the revenue from our campaigns with bloggers 50/50. We feel that it’s only fair since bloggers are doing the real hard work – wrigin quality content. Second to this, we offer a CPM model rather than a CPC model. Other models are on the cards, but for now the CPM model works well and it is a widely understood and accepeted one.
docmoo

January 19th, 2009 at 12:55 pm

Thanks for the update Lester. Having been involved in several web projects I empathize with rigors of launching such a service.