We’ll also be demoing our v3 product for those interested.

So, if you will be at SXSW, please leave us a quick note in the form below and we will reach out a week before the event to setup a time to meet up. We will be there from March 9th – 12th for the interactive portion of SXSW.

Previously, the fee was 2% of the total amount with a $1 cap. So, the most that would ever be paid is the $1. The recent change at PayPal is increasing this cap to $10. So, it’s 2% of the transaction with a cap of $10.

At BSA we have always absorbed reasonable cashout fees like this. For example, we pay publishers via check or PayPal for free up to two times per month. Both cashout methods cost us roughly $1 to process and it was easy for us to bury this fee for everyone. However, we have never covered fees for cashing out via wire transfer since it is much more expensive and not very easy to bury. Unfortunately, this new fee structure from PayPal also isn’t easy for us to bury. We will still cover the original $1 per cashout that we have always covered, but the remainder of the fees will now be deducted from your earnings.

For example, let’s say you are cashing out $1,000. Previously, you would receive exactly $1,000 since BuySellAds would cover the $1 processing fee. Now, if you have an international PayPal account and cashout $1,000, you will see $991 in your PayPal account ($1,000 – $10 max payment fee + BSA’s reimbursement for the original $1 fee).

Don’t worry, you still have options:

1. You can opt to cashout via check, which will continue to be free. We understand that cashing out via check does take a bit longer to arrive, but it’s also free.

2. You can reduce the number of times that you cashout to minimize the fees. If you are the type who regularly does 2 cashouts per month, maybe drop down to 1. Or, cashout every other month. We’re not trying to suggest that it’s possible for everyone to do this, but it is another option.

In addition, we will be working to integrate some additional payment options for folks living abroad (we love you the same as we love our US based publishers!). So, stay tuned here on the blog to find out when more are available. We’d also welcome any feedback you have in working with the other usual suspects: Payoneer and Skrill (formerly Moneybookers). If there are others you are using, please speak up.

A common excuse might be

“well, I just can’t get enough time for this from the design team”

or

“it’s too expensive to develop new creative this often”

My response: get creative.

Let’s say you do have an in-house designer. Chances are, asking them to design advertising creative for you is like asking them to mop the floor (pro tip: by calling it “advertising creative” vs. “banner ads” you might be one notch higher in their priority list than actually mopping the floor). Don’t have your in-house designer do ALL of the design work. Have them set the tone and creative direction vs. having them execute all of the design iterations.

Then, hire a shop like Right Banners or Digital Telepathy to execute on their direction. You won’t burn out your in-house designer, you will have multiple people from those companies working on new designs for you, and you will find that it’s definitely cheaper than using someone in-house.

My ad ran for 13 days, from 3/7 to 3/20. It cost $650, and I spent $50 per day. In total it had 1,288,378 impressions (282,732 uniques) and yielded 20,700 clicks (18,420 uniques).

That’s a CTR of 1.61%, or 6.49% per unique redditor. This CTR works out to a CPC of 3.14 cents, or 3.53 cents per unique visitor, and a CPM of $1.98, or $2.30 for uniques.

This goes to show why it’s important to try new things – all the time – when it comes to advertising. Instead of just having AdWords, Facebooks Ads, etc. as your go-to default buy, next month throw something else into the mix.

Who knows, maybe reddit will even be kind enough to let BuySellAds tie into their self-serve system so that we can help BSA advertisers buy on reddit (wink wink, nudge nudge).

Go on, read the rest of Gabriel’s experience advertising with reddit.

It seems like all we hear about these days in the world of web-design and web-development is this thing called responsive web-design. And with reason.

Being able to design and build websites that adapt to the user’s screen size, viewport and resolution is amazing. It’s now easier than ever to shuffle page elements around and create breakpoints and make our websites look and feel great on any device.

This is where the web is going. It’s not a trend, and it’s here to stay. But what about advertising?

Standard Banner Sizes

Have a look at the most popular banner size and you’ll quickly notice that the world of online advertising isn’t taking into account responsive and adaptive web-design. At least not yet.

Displaying a 728×90 leaderboard ad on an iPhone won’t work and a quick look at the Rising Stars ad units you find on the IAB website will make you wonder if anyone is even thinking of mobile users and taking adaptive web-design into consideration.

The very first websites I designed had a fixed width and were hovering around 800×600 pixels—and sometimes even 640×480.

Today that’s almost the size of a banner. In fact some of the newer banner sizes you see being introduced go up to 970px wide and you see sizes like 300x1050px.

Try displaying those on a smartphone. Also, resizing images on the fly is a big no. Advertisers purchase based on fixed and standardized sizes.

Should We Keeping Thinking Bigger?

It seems like banners are getting bigger and bigger and even though our monitors are also getting bigger (I’m writing this on a 24′ screen, which may be considered small by some) there’s more and more iPhone and Android users out there viewing and reading content on incredibly small screens.

I think we should also think in terms of smaller screen resolutions. That’s where responsive web-design can come to the rescue.

Different Ad Networks

Responsive and adaptive web-design is still in its infancy and it may take some work and planning to get it right but it can definitely be done.

Of course there are ad networks like Ad Packs and FusionAds that can make it easier for publishers to run advertising by displaying a single ad per page which is usually unobtrusive and can be styled rather easily to fit most screen resolutions and sizes.

But, online magazines, big news websites and other publications that require larger advertising campaigns to run will definitely prefer bigger ad sizes. Advertisers will often prefer to buy a bigger ad format. The 300×250 format is a popular one.

From Mobile To The Bigger Screens

More and more designers and developers are approaching web projects with responsive web-design in mind. Mobile first is the key.

Starting with the smallest size possible (usually 320px wide) and then going up to 1382px wide makes a lot of sense—especially when you think about advertising.

If you can successfully integrate advertising into your website design at 320px wide, doing the same at a bigger resolution shouldn’t be a problem—it’s a matter of shuffling things around and positioning ads carefully.

Planning your advertising strategy will definitely save you from a lot of headaches later down the road.

Some Solutions

Like I mentioned earlier, bigger ad formats like 300×1050 and 970×250 definitely won’t work well on an iPhone. But, it’s possible to hide those for mobile users and only display certain ads, and then display bigger ones to people viewing on a desktop computer.

From a functional perspective, your first instinct might be to use a simple display:none; in your stylesheet to hide bigger ads from showing up after a certain breakpoint. However, it’s not that easy.

What happens here is that the ad code is still being loaded, the impressions are counted for the advertiser, but their ad isn’t being shown. Using display:none to hide some ads would result in skewed numbers and would definitely affect the performance of ad campaigns. Display: none; isn’t a solution, it just creates more problems.

A more elegant solution, and one that would be acceptable from an advertising perspective, would be to use Javascript to detect the browser width or viewport and then prevent a certain section or div from loading. Sure, JS can be turned off by the user, but the vast majority of ads are displayed using JS anyhow.

We believe that the absolute best solution for integrating ads into a responsive design is better planning. When selling ad campaigns on a responsive site, depending on your traffic volume, you can approach advertisers a couple different ways:

1. If you have a ton of traffic, you can simply divide up your inventory better. Sell campaigns for mobile devices, tablets, and desktop/pc separately to advertisers. Then, it’s very clear to them what they are buying. For large sites, this is a fantastic opportunity to create better advertising experiences for your advertisers and your visitors. And, there’s a good chance you will discover an interesting additive revenue stream from these new mediums.

2. This strategy will work for both very large sites and medium sized sites: ask for more than one ad size from your advertisers. Yes, this approach will require a bit more work from you and your advertisers; however, I’d argue that if you have a responsive website you are the type of person who cares about the experience users have on your site and this shouldn’t be that big of a deal. The only setback for most folks is that their ad server probably doesn’t support this technique and you will need to code something custom on your own. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we (BuySellAds) already have this capability in our new offering being released the first quarter of this year (for early notification of when it will be ready: BuySellAds v3. Sounds neat, eh? Wait until you see it in action (we’ll post a live example of this when we release this for everyone).

One of my recent favorite concepts (so far) is Rob Flaherty’ responsive HTML ad. Granted, this solution would mean extra work from advertisers to create and code this and it doesn’t address issues like rich media ads or animated graphics for example, but nonetheless I find it’s a very creative and innovative solution.

Conclusion

The important thing to remember is that no matter the technique you use to display, hide, remove or reposition ads on your responsive website, it’s not the technique that matters but the careful planning and thought that went into it.

Now it’s your turn to talk. Mind sharing your own tips, techniques and experiences?

While processing payments I often glance over publisher websites to get a feel for their overall monetization strategy. Often times, it only takes a very small adjustment for a publisher to make more money. Here are three simple things to consider as you work toward your goals in 2012:

1. List Your Best Inventory for Sale

If you’re providing the second best inventory through the BSA Marketplace you should expect to sell ads at a second rate. It’s that simple.

If you’re running a sidebar banner, selling it in a location below an Adsense banner, you should cut your ad price in half. You’re placing Adsense, a remnant ad unit by nature, above a direct sold ad unit that commands more money, more attention, and more brand value for your blog.

2. Stick to Standard Ad Sizes

When you’re working with advertisers they sometimes have an art director, or someone to whip up graphics in house. It’s safest to assume, however, that most advertisers are walking into our inventory with a bag full of prepared banners that are IAB standard sizes.

If you provide standard sizes then you aren’t asking someone to make a custom banner, which requires additional time and resources on the advertiser’s end. Remember, this additional time and resources will be considered as part of the cost when making an ad buy. By sticking to standard ad sizes you are making your ad inventory more buyable.

3. Focus on Quality Traffic Not Quantity

Your first instinct after browsing our inventory may be to raise traffic. More impressions = more money, right? Not all traffic is equal. For example Stumble Upon traffic, a very attainable source of traffic in the niches we work with, is often worth very little. The visitors can be personified easily as someone who comes to a website, expects to spend 5 to 15 seconds on the site, then hop to the next article that makes their jaw drop. While this traffic may give you impressive numbers, and give you more impressions to sell, you can be sure that advertisers will notice the low quality / low converting traffic. This pattern, and an excess of low quality traffic will lead to a high turn-over rate with your advertisers and less recurring revenue.

I run a site, UX Booth, a publication about User Experience that fits into the larger niche of web design and development. We often hover around 100,000 impressions each month. Sure, we could mass promote our articles across sources we know will inflate our numbers. However, this wouldn’t be quality traffic. Even though our numbers are modest we are still able to command a $6 to $8 CPM since we have high quality traffic.

You shouldn’t be here for a quick one month sale. Value truly comes with building a positive relationship and expectation with an advertiser. That’s how you sell ads for multiple months in a row. It’s a more sustainable income.

Let’s Grow the Fire Together

Have a question specific to your website? Drop us an email in support or leave a comment here. Let’s help each other build a bigger fire.

Back to the story. It looks like we’re getting very close to seeing, in self-serve mode, what it is that Twitter has been working on the past year+ with the Promoted Tweets interface.

The platform allows advertisers to purchase products like Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts on a cost-per-engagement or cost-per-follower basis. Prices for ads on Twitter are said to range from $2.50 to $4 for every follower associated with a Promoted Account, and $0.75 to $2.50 for every engagement (being a click, favorite, retweet or @reply) associated with a Promoted Tweet.
via MediaBistro

What’s interesting about this is how incredibly different this will be from AdSense. When most folks think of text ads they immediately think of AdSense (including myself), and I’m pretty sure that many will also compare ads on Twitter to AdSense. The biggest challenge for Twitter in monetizing Twitter is that they don’t control the content and it will be harder to wrap a display experience around content that you con’t control. You could argue that the same is true for Google Search – not so fast – Google definitely controls the content that shows up in search. Their entire business revolves around continuously improving that content. For Twitter, it’s nothing like that. They have zero control over the content. And if/when they do try to control the content, they get the 1st amendment folks all excited. While they do control the Twitter search results, I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of Twitter consumption doesn’t happen on a search results page.

Nik Cubrilovic had “invented” the notion of a 125 pixel square ad that we’d sell for a flat rate, which was an unqualified success and was quickly copied by everyone else.

read more

It will be interesting to see how long the 125 x 125 hangs around. Whenever I see an 88 x 31, I immediately assume the website has not been updated in about 10 years. The 125 x 125 still has plenty of time left, but it’s definitely becoming less and less “preferred” by advertisers.

Every service and product on a market has one key component in its life cycle—marketing. Look around you: pretty much any product you can point your finger at requires marketing. Pull out your iPhone or Android phone and you’ll find dozens or hundreds of apps(depending, of course, on your appetite for apps), and each of these mobile apps requires some degree of marketing.

A little fish in the big sea

This summer, the iTunes App Store celebrated its third birthday. The Apple store for mobile apps launched June 2008; they became overnight pioneers of the space by providing an application store for mobile devices. What a grand ole’ time it was at the very beginning—during the first several months, app developers could be confident that once they come up with an solid idea for an app and developed it, the product would bring in a cash flow. Bingo: almost no marketing efforts required!

Fast forward: in October 2011, more than 500,000 iOS apps later, any iPhone or iPad app requires serious marketing! There are many fish in the sea now, so it’s more important than ever that potential customers see how shiny your app’s scales are.

Perspective, perspective

You can look at the App Store from a user perspective or an iOS app developer perspective. A user may experience difficulties finding the best app for his purposes, which will often send him off to look for outside perspective. He may Google up an app review site and get some hints from there. He may ask his friends or just dump the search altogether. After all, choice can be utterly overwhelming. Heavens won’t fall for the user if he has to forego downloading this particular app.

It’s totally different case when it comes to app developer. If your app is sitting in limbo, it probably goes without saying that your users will know nothing about it. All your development efforts just fly right out the window. Those five-to-ten months of hard work are over and nothing happens. You’ve published your app and see a miserable number of downloads (read: profit). I’ve heard this sad story far too many times.

ComboApp as a mobile app marketing agency was born out of necessity, after we’d seen from our own iPhone app development and marketing experience that we couldn’t really find the right company to help us with apps marketing. We’d gained pretty valuable experience we decided to leverage as an app marketing agency. And over the years, we’ve tried lots of different marketing techniques and, quite frankly, this process of refinement is never-ending.

But with that never-ending refinement comes ever-growing expertise. I would now like to present you with the three most important steps of your app marketing plan:

Marketing copy

Developing solid and, most importantly, coherent app marketing copy means (for one) having a well designed icon that speaks for itself and gives your app a unique identity. Remember that app users will skim through tons of apps on the App Store, and his purchasing decision may very well be triggered by an app’s icon.

Then comes the app’s description: it’s all about striking a balance between exposing the app’s best features and not overloading users with too much information. With feature-spec overload, he’ll either fall asleep while reading or just move on.

Finally, the app’s screenshots should tell a small story about the app. What is this product about? And of course, like with the icon, the app’s title and keywords set should be well thought through from both a user perspective and an app’s ranking on the App store point-of-view. This in the final key in solidifying an app’s identity, in telling its story.

Launch Day

An app’s launch on the App Store shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. You need to have a professionally written press release and a list of app review sites you know will publish an app review. The app should have its own website, Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page. All these things should already exist pre-launch, and you need to have ready a strategy that attacks how you’re going to engage with your followers and fans.

Banner ads and mass Twitter outreach

Despite what you may have read, banner ads aren’t dead. Does their efficacy vary? Sure…but you’re reading this article on the publication of one of the best banner ads one-stop-shopping platforms out there. I wouldn’t say this so blatantly if we hadn’t used the BuySellAds service for about a year; I can really speak from experience. The same goes for blasting promotional tweets about an app.

BuySellAds has a great number of vendors who will help to spread the word about your app to thousands of iOS app users. You can (and should) use both venues for app promotion from the beginning, and then through the period that interest in your app starts to decline.

The bottom line is that mobile app development is just another business and serious marketing, like with almost all other businesses, should go hand in hand with your new product.

In the wise words of a Zombie, it’s the time of the season for loving. Which is why BuySellAds is offering up some bonus credits to buys, and doing so in two tiers. And the deal is available December 1st to the 12th.

Let’s say you decide to launch a new ad campaign with BSA, and you figure between $5,000 and $9,999 is a good place to start (pro-tip: it is). Well, we’ll see your $5,000 and raise you 10% credit. That’s right—if you launch that new $5,000+ ad campaign, we’ll tack on an extra $500. $6,800? That’s $680 for you, from us. Considering it’d probably be insulting to keep showing off our sweet math skills with more examples, you can take it from there.

But wait — there’s more! You buyers out there who launch a $10,000+ campaign will see an added 20% in their BSA stockings. Again, we’ve shown how awesome we are at math; nobody likes a showoff.

So to recount our holiday tidings, we’re rolling out:

• A 10% bonus credit for buyers spending between $5,000 and $9,999 on a new campaign.
• A 20% bonus credit for those investing $10,000 or more into their new campaign.

It’s just our way to show you that we love you. And we do. Look into our eyes (if you can see them through our sunglasses). Deeply. There it is. Now you know for sure.

And anyway, Santa (or maybe it was Haley Joel Osment. Or Morgan Freeman) told us once that it’s better to give than to receive. And we’re prone to listen. We can use all the good karma we can get, as we’ve got our eyes on this, the world’s most advanced toilet. Hopefully Morgan Freeman is listening.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know. In the meantime, a great big happy holidays from all of us here at BuySellAds! May your turkeys be fat, your stockings stuffed, your dreidels spinning, and your in-laws agreeable. Again – keep in mind that this deal is only good between now and December 12th, 2011 for new campaigns, so better act now!

For your campaign to be credited please fill out a support request, or email support@buysellads.com with your Subscription ID.