

Duck Duck Go's Experiences with ad.ly - bjplink
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-experiences-with-adly.html

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dlg
I'm an angel investor in Ad.ly, so I'm not 100% aware of everything going on
there, but I at least thought I'd chime in.

First, Ad.ly wants to make sure the ads stay high-quality. That's why they
have pretty strict rules that everything must be marked as an ad, nothing is
written in the first person, everything must be approved by publishers, etc.
It makes it harder--as Gabriel saw. They're working on ways to make publisher
approval better (there is an email that is sent to handle approvals; I'll ask
the ad.ly guys if there's an unusual error rate).

Second, I know they're working on lots of tools to make it easier to choose
appropriate publishers. Everyone wants to use different metrics for how they
choose, so it's a tricky problem, but the feedback is useful. Pricing is based
on several measures of influence, and they tend to correlate well with CTR
from what I understand.

As Gabriel noted, the CPC is usually significantly better than almost any
other high-quality ad network. So, it's cost-effective on a click basis. I
hope with the tools to get volume as well, they'll make it easy to get volume.

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prawn
Pick a few people and maybe create special profiles that come up when someone
searches for them. Have the profiles feature a headshot, Twitter profile,
Facebook page, website, etc as the top search result (a bit like Google's
World Cup stuff -
[http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=brett+holman](http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=brett+holman)).

Make them interesting enough that when the people in question find out about
them, they want to show their friends.

Find some way of notifying them, either through a Google search or ad, or even
just contact them and explain that you're interested to know what they think
about the profiles idea. (In truth, you will have chosen them specifically
because they talk/post fairly often to a broad audience.) Make sure they know
that you're fine with them publicising the link, it's not secret or anything -
in fact, the more feedback the better. They might be more likely to spread the
word if they feel that they've been chosen ("I wanted to choose some of the
best designers around to get initial feedback.").

If not profiles, find some other way of presenting DDG that is unique to them.
You probably don't want to follow in Google's semi-aborted footsteps of
mimicking Bing's background image, but that could be a way of getting
designers on side - background or masthead or sidebar. "Hey guys, I got picked
to design one of Duck Duck Go's unique mastheads - they're the new Google.
Check it out here..."

(Thinking aloud.)

Of course, you'd want to be honest with the feature you were involving them in
(not a masthead that'd never be used live, etc). Otherwise, it reminds me of a
publicity method some dodgy guy I knew wanted to try. Build a site for a
start-up and then email thousands of web developers asking for quotes to
redevelop the site (then never proceed with the project). Then email thousands
of accountants and explain your business and say you need help with your
accounts and ask if they take on this sort of work, but never follow through.
And then thousands of office cleaners, and IT supply companies, and graphic
design companies and caterers (to cater your launch party, of course),
removalists and so on.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thx for thinking about it. I do make profiles of people, from Crunchbase and
other sources, e.g. <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg>

But I haven't ever written anyone about them. I know people search for their
names, so I can only imagine they are not compelling enough right now to
share. Not sure if there is a way to make them so.

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bryanh
I think it shows how immature a platform is when a customer does all of the
data crunching that the host should do for you:

    
    
       1. Downloading the full list of top influential twitter users from trst.me (~22K users).
    
       2. Hacking ad.ly's URLs and then downloading a big list of people you can advertise with.
    
       3. Cross checking with the trst.me list to only keep top influencers.
    
       4. Cross checking that output with the twitter API to only keep people recently retweeted.
    
       5. Taking that subset and downloading ad.ly info including price, followers, & avg tweets.
    
       6. Filter out people > 10 tweets/day and then sort by price/follower count.
    

(Granted this is what I do with Google Adwords and Adsense all the time, but
you would never see me calling them immature [or maybe just complacent?])

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imajes
Being one of the people that Gabe sent the ad request to - i can attest ot the
fact that the adly spend rates are just not good enough to present value for
money.

There's a very high threshold in which i'm willing to take money (say, 3-4
figures minimum) to advertise a product via twitter -- you simply lose
followers.

Also, now that people are following more than 1000s of tweets per day, you
simply cannot pay attention to it all unless you are focused on twitter 100%
all day.

So it's not worth an advertiser spending money on advertising either.

Gabe- ping me back, i have some experience about clickthru when celebs tweet
your stuff.

\-- james

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riffer
Why does the first table have 71 clicks, but the second has 20? While the cost
looks like it might be $31.88 in the second table, but only $24.83 in the
first one? I ask because the re-tweet experiment got 73 clicks, and the
relative performance is potentially interesting.

[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/twitter-rt-
test-...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/twitter-rt-test-
results.html)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
The spend was $24.83. The second picture was a possible spend for one
campaign, but since most were denied then it didn't actually spend that money.

------
jackowayed
So Ad.ly is still operating on Twitter even though it blatantly violates their
TOS? How does that work?

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dyogenez
That's what I thought too based on all the press (TC, RRW, Mashable), but the
next day Twitter clarified that sites like Ad.ly and SponsoredTweets aren't in
violation. Their change was aimed at services that show the Twitter stream
intermixed with ads based on the content that aren't from Twitter. Since
Twitter is rolling out their whole "in stream ads" platform that app
developers can use soon, this seems to target that - and other places that try
to target ads based on the surrounding Tweets. (note: I work on
SponsoredTweets, so we've obviously been watching this closely. :)

~~~
watmough
If I saw this sort of ad coming from people I follow, they will be unfollowed
pretty sharpish.

