Getting Close to a Completely Automated Model in AdBull

As the title suggests, we've almost completed the development of an automated self-serve advertiser sign-up. This will allow advertisers to sign-up to become AdBull contextual advertisers within the PPC marketplace. If you'd like to stay informed, go to AdBull.com and sign-up for our newsletter. We'll be sending out a blast as soon as it is ready.

Getting It Done

Over the past few weeks we experienced a few set backs as well as accomplished a few feats that have continued to move the new company forward. Of note has been developing relationships with a few people and a few ad networks that have significant footprints on the publisher side. In short, available inventory is increasing at a nice clip.

On the monetization side (advertisers looking to buy the inventory), we're still looking at how to increase our RPC (rev per click). Right now we have many, if not most, of the tier 2/3 ad providers plugged into our system. Essentially we determine what a relevant PPC ad should be then query all of the ad providers and end up displaying the most relevant & highest paying partners ad.

Problem is the tier 2/3 ad providers primarily distribute arbitrage advertisers and have lost the thousands of SMEs that used to be in the system. There are multiple reasons for this - regardless, I NEED HIGHLY RELEVANT ADVERTISERS!!!

While I really wanted to get the model financially stable using third-party ad providers, it looks like we are going to have to go ahead and build our own database of advertisers.

All of this has made me realize just how dominant Google has become and how dependent SMEs and publishers are on their ability to advertise on and display through Google's ad network. While that is great for Google, it really hurts the SMEs because they are not able to be competitive in the bidding process as more and more advertisers jump into the auction.

It will be interesting to see how well received Cursor Marketing and AdBull will be in the SME market. Unlike all of the other ad networks that are competitive with Google (which they all have really already lost the battle) - we own the patents for our ad unit and don't have to be worried about being commoditized by larger companies... It will be fun to watch!

Holy Crap - almost 2 years have gone by!!!

I was going through some initiatives that the new company (Cursor Marketing & AdBull.com) have planned and remembered that a few years ago I started using blogger.com to test blogging platforms. Well right on cue when I went to blogger.com it popped open to my account and was waiting for my next entry.

Well a lot has happened in the almost 2 years since my last post... I finished a business plan, raised a little capital, brought together a team, bought a few patents and launched a few products. One of the most promising in the near-term is AdBull.com - a new contextual ad unit that presents a targeted text-based ad to a user's cursor.

While we've only been launched for a couple of months, we've already tested the product against other contextual solutions (Adsense, Vibrant, Kontera and Infolinks) and are achieving significantly higher click-thru rates than any of those other ad units. While we are still in our infancy, we are plugging along and bringing in a few new publisher partners everyday.

This reminds me of starting FindWhat.com and getting our first few publisher partners... they trickled in but after a few months the momentum of picked up to the point that it was hard keeping up with the new publishers that were signing up.

The next challenge that we had to tackle back then - just like now - is how to monetize the traffic we are generating. Hopefully I have the answer in the next post.