The Reluctant Blogger

The one time I visited a friend of mine in his office at Microsoft, he was working as a PM in the SQL Server team. Everyone I met there was super motivated about the product, and excited to be competing with other big companies in the DB industry. I overheard one conversation, and in reference to Oracle, one of the team members literally chanted “kill, kill, kill”. What I saw was a competitive environment which was breeding motivated, happy employees.

Yahoo employees clearly do not want to work at Microsoft. In the past few months there have been stories of mass defections of top engineering talent over to other companies, in particular, Google. If a deal were to go through between Microsoft and Yahoo, Microsoft would stand to claim thousands of employees who would have an attitude of having been defeated. These are not the employees Microsoft needs to compete with Google.

The employees Microsoft needs are its own employees. If Microsoft decides to walk away from this deal, which it should, this whole series of events can be used to drum up a competitive spirit among their staff. Yahoo didn’t want to join us? Fine, now we crush them. Build an environment around that which has the competitive spirit of Microsoft projects of the past. Vista’s lukewark adoption and bad publicity has probably been a severely demotivating factor in recent months, and a new target, in a space that matters more than a desktop operating system (web search/advertising/other distributed services), is probably exactly what they need.

JobVent.com currently has two kinds of ads:

• Third Party Ads (Google Ad-Sense and Bluelithium)
• Sponsored flat rate ads

The third party ads are obvious. Any section of the site not reserved for a sponsored ad currently hosts an ad from one of those two networks, which pay Arlington Development mostly on a CPM basis. The sponsored flat rate ads reserve the ad space on one or more pages of the website for a flat monthly fee, effectively ignoring impressions.

Some clients have requested to advertise on the front page and other sections of JobVent.com that are not specific to one particular company’s reviews. I think the best way to do this is to offer a CPM model for various sections of JobVent.com that get higher amounts of overall traffic than the individual company pages. This way our advertising client knows they are getting their money’s worth, because they will be able to monitor overall impressions versus ad-expenditure on the site.

Our clients have requirements for advertising on JobVent.com that prompted us to develop our own ad-network (it is still a work in progress, but the back end is 100% complete). Some of these requirements, which we couldn’t find in prebuilt ad management scripts or third party services are as follows:

• CPM model, with monthly expenditure limit per ad zone
• Multiple ad zones per site
• Multiple sites per user
• Multiple targetable pages per site, with varying ad zones
• Default ads when 0 balances remain for a zone/page combination (integration with third party ads)
• Client self service
  • Check account balance
  • Add credits through Paypal or Authorize.net integration
  • Check monthly balance remainder
• Administrative functions
  • Auto-email clients on low balance

So, long story short, I built an ad network this weekend. Like I said, the back end is done, so we can start putting sites, ad zones, pages and ad targets in manually. Its currently being used to serve all the CPM ads on JobVent.com. Adding a sponsored CPM ad (non-third party ad) is now just a process of adding an advertiser account and applying credits to the account. Its also easy to add other sites that might want to host ads.

I’d like to offer this network as a service to other sites that are out there that have similar requirements. Let me know if you think this could be useful on your site and any unique requirements you may have. Once the front end is done, you’d be able to add credits to your advertiser’s accounts, set monthly limits, monitor ad network activity, and potentially allow your clients to log in to check their own ad activity. Free service? Yes, aside from maybe displaying our own ads for some fraction of a percent of your impressions.