

Ask HN: Anyone advertised on the DECK, FusionAds, SO or Daring Fireball? - epi0Bauqu

Wondering if anyone has advertised on these tech-heavy niche ad networks, and if so, what were the results?<p>Here are the links:<p>http://decknetwork.net/<p>http://fusionads.net/creative-network/<p>http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/<p>http://inedomedia.com/stackoverflow.aspx
======
fookyong
I have tried advertising on FusionAds. Here is my limited assessment.

First of all, this is what the campaign traffic looked like for the duration
of the campaign. I did a one week "burst" campaign and did not run any other
(significant) campaigns during this period:

[http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4070/4619944957_84f99f0aff_o....](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4070/4619944957_84f99f0aff_o.png)

I rotated 3 ads on Fusion Ads, all for the same product with slightly
different offers / message.

The Good:

The network that you get exposed to is high quality. I think because of that I
had some residual indirect effects such as high profile bloggers suddenly
mentioning my app or writing about it in the weeks following the campaign.
Might not have been able to achieve this otherwise.

CTR seemed to be in line with expectations.

The Bad:

The tech crowd is a hard sell. There were 3 sales generated from this
campaign, which is quite bad considering the ad budget. I don't think the
audience was quite right for my product, at least to expect direct
conversions.

That said, perhaps it was my message / ad design. To be honest with you,
banner ads have not been an effective way to generate sales for me in general.
Testimonials and blog posts converted much higher.

Conclusion:

YMMV, but I would use FusionAds again for market awareness. To launch a new
product or launch a product update. It exposes you to a crowd of bloggers and
influencers who would otherwise be hard to reach (in one shot like this). And
I would hope for indirect effects from that, much like hiring a PR firm to
contact press / bloggers on my behalf. I wouldn't expect direct sales from the
banner, but again, that's just been my experience.

EDIT: got my terminology wrong - I didn't run a "roadblock", I ran a "burst"
campaign :)

------
acangiano
If you are looking for leads, as opposed to simple brand awareness, my advice
would be to ensure that your product is expensive enough to make it
worthwhile.

We looked into StackOverflow advertisement for <http://ThinkCode.TV>, but we
gave up on it due to our low pricing.

For example, our MacRuby screencast costs $8.99, of which $4.05 is actual
profit for the company. Buying 100,000 impressions for the macruby tag costs
$1000 (their minimum). With a typical click-through rate of 0.20%, we would
receive about 200 clicks. We wouldn't break even, even if all 200 clicks
converted (which is a ridiculous assumption).

For brand awareness or high ticket items, it may be worth it though.

~~~
benatkin
Wow. I'm into screencasts, but I'd never heard of you! I'm curious about the
pre-order screencasts. How much planning did you do beforehand? Are lesson
plans subject to change? Are you set up to do bulk refunds if you don't finish
a series in a reasonable amount of time?

I think it's a good idea, perhaps taken a little too far. I'd probably want to
finish half of a series before taking money for a whole series.

~~~
acangiano
> Wow. I'm into screencasts, but I'd never heard of you!

We launched a month ago. :)

> I'm curious about the pre-order screencasts. How much planning did you do
> beforehand?

There is quite a bit of planning behind it:

* Only authors that we're familiar with and trust can do courses (as opposed to authoring a single screencast).

* Each author needs to be specific about what material they're going to cover in each lesson.

* Half of the royalties from preorders are withheld until the course is completed. This motivates authors to finish what they started, as well as giving us funds to handle emergency situations.

* We only release a course after work on the second lesson has been started. This helps us evaluate how long the first lesson took a given author. If it took too long, we won't start a course, but simply convert that lesson into a single screencast.

* We aim for a release of at least one lesson per month, give or take.

* When it comes to TDD and Python, these courses have been adopted/translated from our Italian catalog, where the fourth and fifth lessons, respectively, are being created at the moment. The Italian version of the Python course should be finished by the end of June, then it will be a matter of translation.

> Are you set up to do bulk refunds if you don't finish a series in a
> reasonable amount of time?

Creating a whole course takes a lot of time and work. It's akin to writing a
large technical book. For this reason, we may disagree on the definition of
"reasonable amount of time". What's sure is that if after a year, a course has
yet to be completed, and a customer complains, we'll issue a partial refund or
some form of "store credit".

Ultimately, we sincerely care about providing really good customer care, and
strive to ensure that all of our courses end up being completed.

------
chrisbowler
Well, I can give a few thoughts from the other side of this fence. At Fusion,
we do our part to get our promotions in front of the right eyeballs. As well,
by now the value of our brand can lend some credence to our customers.

Unfortunately, we sometimes get a client who thinks that just by getting some
exposure on a network like ours or in an app like Tweetie, sales will sky
rocket. But for that to happen, some thought and hard work also have to go
into the promotion.

We can help an advertiser get the traffic, but if the product/service is low
quality, conversions will be low. We do our best to filter out the bad and
only promote the good stuff, products we believe in or use ourselves, but
reality is that the occasional lemon gets in the door.

Advertising with Fusion will help with your brand awareness, but because so
many of our customers our smaller one/two man shops — which we love — we care
about conversions as well. And so we try to help each customer get the best
ROI by encouraging attractive graphics and smart copy.

------
puffl
In case you haven't seen it, David Greiner from Campaign Monitor wrote a
fantastic, in-depth blog post about his team's success (or otherwise) with
FusionAds, the Deck and others:

[http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2779/promoting-
with...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2779/promoting-with-banners-
ads/)

------
grayprog
I had a very similar experience to what fookyong had with FusionAds. We were
running 2 parallel one-week "blasts" for our MacGraPhoto
(<http://www.macgraphoto.com>) bundle of graphical Mac software exactly 6
months ago.

FusionAds seemed to be very fit for this because of their focus on design and
graphic professionals. It was also the biggest one source of advertising for
us.

The process and their support were very good. Unfortunately we've had
extremely little return from the ads. At least in terms of direct sales. I
think the gross income didn't cover 10% of the budget of ads and after split
of the revenue it's negligible.

I don't know if it had any effect in raising awareness or interest from
bloggers/news agencies as its hard to measure and we also did a press-release
and advertised and were reviewed on other sites.

So for this campaign of us it turned out to be quite non-helpful. We lost
money with it. Of course this doesn't have to happen to you if you have a
different product or market.

Coincidentally, today is exactly the date where the PayPal money from my
campaign should have been unfreezed if not for my blog post 6 months ago,
which was #1 on HN back then. Thanks guys. I think your support helped to make
PayPal their move and unfreeze the money on short notice.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000829>

------
Disparity
I've done Daring Fireball several times for The Little App Factory (tlaf.com).
While the immediate response is fairly good, I believe the real payoff is more
long term. Publishers and the hardcore mac community notices what's advertised
there and may be more inclined to write-up your product or service.

~~~
patio11
Note that you can bootstrap your way into this sort of effect by figuring out
what your influencer of choice (blogger, NYT journalist, whatever) is likely
to be searching for and then putting AdWords against it. Since they're often a
bit smarter than the average bear and using longtail or obviously non-
commercial queries, these are generally cheap as sin.

Then, rather than a landing page for a commercial service, you direct them to
a page designed to elicit coverage of whatever it is that you're offering.

An example that I don't know that any SEO did so they won't be POed if I
mention it: you know all the Facebook privacy hubub right now? I think it is
quite likely that someone is out there looking for [facebook privacy quote].
If you're going to spend thousands on PR, why not spend a few tens on AdWords
and have something responsive to that. It is very, very cheap if your page
influences coverage at the NYT or pulls in links from bloggers.

~~~
jbrennan
Don't forget these are adword results and not organic. If I were researching a
piece, I likelynwould steer away from "inorganic" results.

~~~
patio11
You are demonstrably savvier than some employees at the Grey Lady whose names
you would almost certainly recognize.

------
jbrennan
I too would really like to know. I've been looking into advertising with
Fusion, as I'm so far a very small one-man shop, but the network idea sounds
very intriguing.

------
drivingsouth
What about influAds? <http://influads.com>

They seem to be quite new but gathering an interesting batch of members. Small
when compared to the scale of the others.

Anyone tried?

------
AlexBlom
I'm also curious to see whether these 'community' concepts actually deliver
results or are just well dressed display ads.

