The Lounge Blog

The Lounge Tops One Million Uniques

James Avery — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:46:11 GMT

The July numbers are in and The Lounge continues to grow at an incredible pace. The number of impressions went from 4.4M in June to 8.3M in July, almost 100% growth. The more important number, the number of unique people seeing our ads, topped one million for the first time. In July 1.5 million people saw ads from The Lounge a 50% jump over the 945k in June.

I am very excited about these numbers, the CodePlex offering and the new CPM room continue to grow and I expect even more growth in August and through the end of the year.

-James

The Lounge Survey Pt. 2

James Avery — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:29:56 GMT

This is the second part in our blog post series about The Lounge survey. You can see part 1 here.

The purpose of our survey was to gather marketing data from our audience, but we also thought it would be interesting to gather more information about what technologies our audience is using. In our last post we featured the languages answers, but I realized that the following is a much better graph of that usage.

Languages

Technologies

I knew going in that we had mostly an ASP.NET audience, but I was surprised by the number of respondents who said they used Windows Forms that often. I expected WPF to be higher than it was. I expect Silverlight is under-represented since we didn't run our survey ads in the Silverlight room.

Unit Testing Tool of Choice

I knew nUnit would be top here, but what is most surprising is that over 80% of the respondents answered this question. Thats a much larger % of unit testers than I expected (of course this survey does not delve into how much they test, that will be the topic for a future survey)

Mocking Tool of choice

About what I expected here, I intentionally left commercial offerings out of the list so that might explain the large number of Other responses. I was also surprised to see 60% responding to this question.

ORM tools

I was surprised to see Linq to Sql almost as popular as NHibernate here and the large number of Other, I must have missed a couple other popular non-commercial tools I am not aware of.

DI Frameworks

Again I was surprised by the number of Other and also that Windsor is still #1.

The next post in this series will cover developers database usage, add-in usage, and much more.

The Lounge Survey Pt. 1

James Avery — Mon, 01 Jan 1900 00:00:00 GMT

Over the last couple months we have been running ads to drive people to our survey and had over 1,000 responses to the survey. The purpose of the survey is to get an idea of the type of developer who frequents the blogs and sites that are part of The Lounge. Our goal wasn't to promote the survey at all costs, but rather to focus on promoting it to the people going to our sites.

The winners of the survey have been selected and emailed, if you didn't win you will have another chance soon as we plan on doing surveys throughout the year.

We asked alot of questions so I am going to split the results across a couple of posts. This post mostly contains the marketing information but the next one will be all technology for you non marketing types. (one sneak peak result at the bottom of this post)

I almost didn't include this question since it the answer was pretty much a forgone conclusion.

I was happy to see 47% of our respondents identified themselves as Senior Developer or above, one of my selling points has always been that our audience is made up of higher level developers and decision makers.

About what I was expecting here.

I was thrilled with these numbers, over 92% of the respondents are involved in the purchasing process with over 25% in full control of the purchasing process.

I didn't know what to expect here but it seems to be fairly spread out with a full 12% of $1 million or more.

And one sneak peak at the next post, here are the results for language question:

I knew that C# would be number 1 but I am surprised it was by such a huge margin, and to think 5 years ago people were wondering if VB.NET or C# was going to be more popular.

I hope to post the next part of the results later this week, its all about technology and has some interesting results

-James

The Lounge June Numbers

James Avery — Mon, 01 Jan 1900 00:00:00 GMT

Since the redesign of our site our monthly numbers are very prominent on the site. I think this adds a level of transparency and it gives us a public scorecard which is very motivating.

We just ran our June numbers and we went from 3.7m impressions to 4.4m impressions, over a 20% monthly increase.

Our unique visitors increased from 744,066 to 945,595, a 27% jump.

While these numbers are exciting they only represent the beginning of the impact of our new CPM offering and our partnership with CodePlex. I expect to see much larger growth next month.

The Lounge starts serving CPM ads

James Avery — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I have been working hard over the last 2 months to build a state of the art ad engine to serve CPM advertising and I am proud to announce that we are launching our first CPM based offering today. The first offering is a room of .NET publishers including top sites like GeeksWithBlogs, DreamInCode, DotNetKicks, and many others. Over the next couple of months I hope to grow this room and introduce new rooms in other niches.

This doesn't mean I am giving up on the model we have been using for over 18 months, the blogger rooms are doing better than ever. In fact this month we are going to be announcing a number of new bloggers joining the ranks and every room is almost sold out.

The CPM market is much more crowded but I feel we can carve out a niche as a premium network of .NET focused sites. We are going to be fanatical about ensuring every site is highly relevant and that all of the ad placements are in optimal locations. You won't find your ads on low quality sites or stacked together at the bottom of the page. Our early tests have already showed a great CTR which we hope to be making public soon.

For publishers we plan on offering a better way to monetize your traffic. We plan on charging competitive CPM rates and if we can't fill up the traffic we will let you decide what you want to do with it. If you would like to show Google Adsense or another network's ads you can configure our engine to do that for you.

If you run a .NET site and you think we would be a good fit to help you with your advertising please drop me a line, if you are a company who would like to reach this great market please get in touch as well.

Thanks,
James Avery

Welcome to The Lounge Blog

James Avery — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to The Lounge blog. We have started this blog to keep our publishers and advertisers up to date on all news related to The Lounge.

We will post about new publishers, new advertisers, monthly summaries on traffic, and new offerings or partnerships.

We will also be using this blog to post about reports, metrics, and other interesting pieces of data about the .NET community in general. As we serve the community these are of interest to us and we believe they are of interest to our advertisers and publishers.

If there is anything you would like to see us write about here please let me know

James
javery@zerkmedia.com