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Ask HN: MixcloudAds, if we white-label it would you use it?

22 points by matclayton ↗ HN
Screencast: http://vimeo.com/9690050

Once we started running ads on the site, we very quickly realised the whole process of selling the ad, receiving the banner, invoicing the advertiser, receiving the money, trafficking the ad and reporting the progress back to the advertiser is very time consuming.

Therefore we set out to solve this problem by building a self-serve direct ad server – an entirely tech driven solution that enables any advertiser – large or small – to set up and serve an ad on Mixcloud within minutes. Sweet!

Since going Live 3 days ago, we are now selling a very significant % of our inventory through the new system, this could be a honeymoon period, could be a serious revenue source.

The good news is we built the system on Google AppEngine independent from our main code base, and with white-labeling in mind from day one. If we were to release this as a white-label product, would any of you actually use it? We would probably use PayPal Adaptive Payments and take a % of ad sales, so no win no fee kind of model.

Mat

15 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] thread
natts
Yes, possibly, depending what advertisers you attract and how much control they and I (the publisher) get about what ads get shown where, and what kind of inventory it can serve.
matclayton
We are finding most of the advertisers are users of mixcloud, and are buying ads to promote either their blogs or their own mixcloud profiles. The idea is the users of your site, buy ads on it, so community based.

Inventory is currently a single fixed 300wx250w image but thats just for our use case, and would need changing.

jfarmer
http://isocket.com

They've powered TechCrunch's ads since last May.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/isocket

tbgvi
Any idea what their business model is? If not commission based, is it a subscription? Based on page views?
matclayton
Or do they sell the excess inventory you dont to a larger ad network??
tbgvi
That would make sense - I've seen some strange ads on TechCrunch that could be explained by that.
jorazzle
John here, Founder of isocket.

Sorry guys, but you'll have to blame the strange ads on Google =)

Publishers on isocket can put another ad network's code in as a default setting - so that when their ad space isn't sold directly, it will default to AdSense / whatever.

We do not arbitrage or sell your unused inventory for our benefit.

In terms of our business model - yes, we're actually commission-free. It's a flat monthly fee. Sorry to do this to ya, but we haven't publicly announced what the pricing is yet.

Cheers

matclayton
Thanks, they never showed up in our search for a solution, prior to going and building it :)
javery
It looks like the majority of TC is being run through Google Ad Manager with lots of inventory going to them (notice all the google ads). I don't see iSocket's ad script anywhere on their page, maybe they interface to Google Ad Manager?
jorazzle
John here, Founder of isocket.

Part of the "open" approach we're taking is not forcing publishers to use our ad server if they don't want to. We have one, but some publishers (like TechCrunch) use our plugins with other ad servers like GAM.

So you won't see our tags on TechCrunch's page, but many of those ads were purchased through our system.

Cheers,

tk999
Also look into openx. Community version and hosted version.
matclayton
We use it for some other ads, and its the sole reason why decided to make our own, its the definition of bad ui, and a real pain to use.
lambdom
Presently, on the webpage of mixcloud, there's an ad that repeat itself horizontally (Like a tile). That's the new kind of bug you can have if people automatically upload a wrong sized image ;) But I like the idea and I'm sure you can fix that bug quite easily.
matclayton
yeah we only just spotted that one, fixing it now :) Always amazed by the new ways users find to break stuff. But that one we should have caught.
sstrudeau
This sounds like something that would go high up on our evaluation list for the company I work for -- for us, there's a big space between our bread-and-butter high end advertisers and the remnant networks filled with advertisers that would like to make sub $5k buys but take as much or more effort than advertisers on the other side of that line.

That said, a pricing model as a % of revenue would probably be less attractive than a cost based on some function of resource utilization -- we don't necessarily need to give you incentives to figure out how to max our revenue; let us worry about optimizing our pricing and maximizing sales; you focus on providing us a kickass product.

Also, ideally we'd be able to traffic ads sold via self-serve into our existing inventory (i.e., not a separate unit or zone) AND avoid overselling impressions we don't have (e.g., we frequently "sell out" of certain geotargeted metro areas) -- so it'd probably be best if it worked in tandem with our ad serving software (currently Google Ad Manager/DFP).