Adgator Blog

It’s been 15 months since we launched Adgator and we’ve learnt a hell of a lot along the way. There have been good times and bad times and as a result of both we’ve identified exactly where we need to be going and how we’re going to get there. This post highlights some core changes that are going to be happening at Adgator in the coming weeks so if you’re on Adgator (or want to be) please read this carefully.

Ad:Dynamo Integration

If you aren’t yet aware we have integrated with SA’s competitor to Google – Addynamo (read this for more info). As part of this we’ve been in a process of integrating stats into the Adgator dashboard as well as setting up all the blogs on Adgator with Ad:Dynamo. I’m please to inform you we’re pretty much done with this.

Over the next couple days those of you who are already serving Ad:Dynamo ads will start to see a new graph on your Adgator Dashboard for this – we’re just tying up a few loose ends. Those of you not yet serving Ad:Dynamo ads will be serving as soon as you update your ad code for your blog (more on this in the point below).

Adgator is moving to enterprise ad-serving technology

For the last 12 months we’ve been testing both Google’s Double-Click and Adtech’s Helios ad serving platforms in an effort to better serve both our advertisers and bloggers and we made a decision towards the end of last year to move Adgator onto Adtech’s platform. We have been using the open-source OpenX ad serving technology however we’ve had major scaling issues and campaign delivery problems which has forced us to move away from it.

We’re in the final stages of the implementation of Adtech and we’re hoping to have everything live by 1 March 2010. The implications for current Adgator members is that you’ll need to update your ad code on your blog when we’re ready to move over. It will be simple and easy to do and we’ll contact you guys with more information when we’re ready to.

We’re dropping around 150 blogs from the Network

As part of our move to Adtech we’re dropping all the blogs that have not served any Adgator ads over the last 2 months. This means that we’re only bringing around 220 blogs over onto Adtech as these are the blogs that are active and, we figured, want to remain Adgator members.

If you’re one of the 150-odd blogs that gets dropped in the migration and you want to still remain apart of it, you will have an opportunity to re-apply for membership.

We’ll be open to new blogs joining

One of the major criticisms we received over the last year is that we’re not allowing new blogs to join – there was method to our madness. We limited new blog registration because of two major reasons. The first being that our technology didn’t allow us to go beyond the 350 blogs we had and the second being that we wanted to be able to monetise all the blogs we did have before opening it up again to new members.

I’m happy to report that this is now coming to an end as we’ve solved these two problems. Anyone who has ever applied to be on the waiting list will be getting an email from us inviting them to join the network. New members will be added to the Adtech platform so you won’t need to update ad code on your site.

Once our migration to Adtech is complete that “join now” form will allow any blog to signup without any further waiting periods.

We apologise that it’s taken so long to get to the waiting list but we really needed to sort our stuff out first before we could let you all in.

If you have any questions or need further clarity let me know in the comment form below.