Influads BlogInfluads Blog | Influads Blog http://www.influads.com/blog Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:18:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 BREAKING: “Adsense for Domains” are crap. Google finally got it, and kills it #deadpool http://www.influads.com/blog/breaking-adsense-for-domains-are-crap-google-kills-it-deadpool.html http://www.influads.com/blog/breaking-adsense-for-domains-are-crap-google-kills-it-deadpool.html#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:55:34 +0000 Anibal Damião http://www.influads.com/blog/?p=751 We hear that Google AdSense for Domains is going to the Deadpool.

This is awesome news for Quality Ads on the web, which we promote so heavily.

Google used to spam people with ads when they’d reach parked domains, which had nothing more than crappy ads. Most people would go there by mistake and the relevancy of those ads, with ou without server technology behind, was dubious at best. Are they finally realizing that the web doesn’t 0.01% CTR kind of ads?

We’re not opening a bottle of champagne tonight on behalf of people that care about ads since we can’t really afford it. Yes, we rather charge a modest commission fees to our quality publishers instead, unlike the rest of the industry.

 

Hi,
We’re contacting you because you’re using AdSense for Domains to monetize your undeveloped domains. After evaluating the benefits of our partner network, we’ve decided to retire the Hosted domains product within AdSense. Going forward, undeveloped domains will only be served through our existing AdSense for Domains distribution network.

Our records show that 50 of your Hosted domains will be affected by this upcoming change, which will follow the schedule below:
March 21: You’ll no longer be able to create new Hosted domains
April 18: Hosted domains will become inactive and it’ll no longer be possible to earn from them
June 27: Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts
To continue monetizing your undeveloped domains, you can migrate your domain portfolio to any domain parking provider. Find out how in our Migration Guide:

Migration Guide
Please note that this upcoming change won’t affect any other AdSense products you’re currently using or the availability of other products to you. In addition, reporting on your Hosted domains will remain available throughout the schedule above and for a period following the retirement.

For more information see the Help Center. We appreciate your understanding and thank you for your patience as we continue to develop new features and offerings within AdSense.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/breaking-adsense-for-domains-are-crap-google-kills-it-deadpool.html/feed 1 “The Consumer isn’t a moron; She’s your wife” David Ogilvy, 1963 http://www.influads.com/blog/the-consumer-isnt-a-moron-shes-your-wife-david-ogilvy-1963.html http://www.influads.com/blog/the-consumer-isnt-a-moron-shes-your-wife-david-ogilvy-1963.html#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:49:10 +0000 Anibal Damião http://www.influads.com/blog/?p=713 The Consumer isn’t a moron; She’s your wife

David Ogilvy, 1963

 

It seams that the advertising industry forgot that message along the years. Mass spamming + irrelevancy wouldn’t cut for Mr Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising back in in 60s so what’s wrong with you today, Mr Advert?

See The pope of modern advertising: David Ogilvy if you have some time. It’s definitely worth to learn on how an advertising genius saw advertising… and how fucked up digital advertising (the most modern form of advertising) became.

 

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/the-consumer-isnt-a-moron-shes-your-wife-david-ogilvy-1963.html/feed 0 Welcoming Arctic Startup – the TechCrunch for the Nordics & The Baltics http://www.influads.com/blog/welcoming-arctic-startup-the-techcrunch-for-the-nordics-the-baltics.html http://www.influads.com/blog/welcoming-arctic-startup-the-techcrunch-for-the-nordics-the-baltics.html#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:27:53 +0000 Anibal Damião http://www.influads.com/blog/?p=711 My personal story around entrepreneurship goes like this:

  • I harvested and sold approx. 15,000 small snails ;) to buy a cool Mountain Bike when I was 14
  • I sold t-shirts in a (very muddy) motocross competition when i was 16
  • I had a small company doing Web Hosting and Development while in college (Alojix) when I was 21

And then I got bored working for a corporate giant since my college didn’t allow me to work on my own project for my final thesis (go figure!!). That was probably the best thing that ever happened to me though, since it leveraged my move to Copenhagen and my renewed, somewhat starved interest in entrepreneurship.

This brings me to this blog post…

 

Artic Startup is the way to know about entrepreneurship and startups in Scandinavia and the Baltics. It was one of few sites that I follow religiously and that allowed me to grow as an entrepreneur during my maturation period before launching InfluAds in 2010. They are also a key contributor to the local scene with events like arctic15.com and others.

 

Today I’m glad to share that Artic Startup (the TechCrunch of the Nordics) is joining InfluAds as one of the awesome publishers of our Startups & Entrepreneurs network.

They join an awesome gang like VentureHacks and world-class blogs from entrepreneurs like Jason Cohen, Nate Westheimer, Ash Maurya, Vlaskovits and so many others.

InfluAds was the first ad network focusing on this audience and we are proud to welcome this awesome publisher from the awesomely beautiful Finland.

By doing so we extend our coverage of a very interesting audience in Scandinavia (the nest of companies like Skype, Spotify, MySQL…) and the Baltics (an emerging area where countries like Estonia and Lithuania are already playing global).

Arctic15 - annual conference for Nordic and Baltic growth entrepreneurs

Steve Huffman talking at Artic Startups Arctic15 event

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/welcoming-arctic-startup-the-techcrunch-for-the-nordics-the-baltics.html/feed 0 The Abusive Nature of Social Advertising http://www.influads.com/blog/the-abusive-nature-of-social-advertising.html http://www.influads.com/blog/the-abusive-nature-of-social-advertising.html#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:35:22 +0000 Anibal Damião http://www.influads.com/blog/?p=688 We like quality ads and advertiser relevancy to a specific audience is a big part of that. Social Advertising builds some of that relevancy using your personal data , which is conceptually flawed in so many (bad) ways.. Using people’s personal data in advertising is a dangerous, unethical step that ignores everyone’s right to control their own identity and privacy.

 

LinkedIn may just went a bit too far on this:

LinkedIn may use these actions to create social ads [...] using your profile photo and name.

Check the recent change on their terms by yourself. But it doesn’t end here. LinkedIn forced an automatic opt-in when good practices would recommend that they opt-OUT everyone by default.

Why is this happening? We hear often how LinkedIn Ads ROI sucks because of their high cost. They may now be trying every trick in the book to increase performance, trying to fool people into clicking more irrelevant ads. Basically, you may be fooled to click one ad even if it sucks just because you saw your friend’s pictures there. That’s bad.

 

This  is also bad for advertisers since they:

  • Lack control over their own brand: The context where ads are shown affect their brand. It is just a matter of time until one advertiser finds out that their ads were promoted using the face of some criminal or pedophile. When they find it, it may well be too late.
  • Fooling your end audience drives clicks but doesn’t drive ROI: The context and relevancy of one ad and the message drives clicks. But if people are fooled by them those clicks are irrelevant and people soon realize it. ROI isn’t driven by clicks but by quality-driven awareness and signups/purchases from those same clicks . Fooling people into clicking one ad DOES NOT necessarily build advertiser ROI.

 

Ads should be highly relevant to their audiences, without “makeup” or dirty tricks. LinkedIn just abused the trust of all their users and no one seem to notice.

PS: You can disable it on LinkedIn Settings->Account->”Manage Social Ads”

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/the-abusive-nature-of-social-advertising.html/feed 0 Spoiling our clients, partners & friends http://www.influads.com/blog/spoiling-our-clients-partners-friends.html http://www.influads.com/blog/spoiling-our-clients-partners-friends.html#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:41:18 +0000 Anibal Damião http://www.influads.com/blog/?p=671 There are a few things that small startups can do to beat their Golias.

Customer service is probably The One. Trying to make your clients, partners or friends feel special is an interesting one.

Some times, it can be a very small gesture. Some other times it can be about going that extra mile to deliver substantially above what was expected, turning a bad situation into a pleasant one. Some other times, it’s just about turning the too formal “How are you?” into something a tod bit more human…

 

We’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, actually.

We are even thinking on how to be unique while doing it. What could be better than this, to raise the bar as a quality-driven ad network? What could be better than this to strengthen our own company culture’s foundation?

We’ll soon share a bit more about what we’re excitedly discussing.

 

But it’s Friday and we had to end the week on a positive note. A few advertiser friends just got a short email: A simple “thank you”, with a “have a nice weekend” and a little something more.

Wondering what it was? Well, you’re not getting lucky this time since we’re not going to telling you ;-)

 

Oh, and by the way… It feels good ;-)

Have an awesome weekend.

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/spoiling-our-clients-partners-friends.html/feed 1 Monetize your Desktop and Web apps better with Premium Ads http://www.influads.com/blog/monetize-your-desktop-and-web-apps-with-premium-ads.html http://www.influads.com/blog/monetize-your-desktop-and-web-apps-with-premium-ads.html#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:25:17 +0000 Anibal Damião http://blog.influads.com/?p=633 Startups and Developers have a hard time monetizing their apps. Web and Desktop apps, specifically focusing on quality lock a valuable relationship and share of mind with their end users. This is incredibly valuable but no one seems to leverage it.  InfluAds simple ad presence, driven by top quality advertisements can be the solution.

We are proud to announce In-App Advertising, InfluAds new take on Quality Advertising.

This will help entrepreneurs working on quality-focused Desktop or Web Apps to:

  • Support Freemium strategies with free, ad-sponsored plans (Evernote is an  awesome case doing it)
  • Full monetization support of free apps
We also believe that this can be huge for launching startups  since they can’t start monetizing earlier with an ad presence while they explore other, long-term monetization strategies.

 

Check what The Next Web had to say about us and some of our launching partners (including Simplenote app, Producteev, Drops app, BoxCar.io, Goplan, Mail slayer and others.

We’re looking forward to partner with even more quality publishers and awesome advertisers. If you have any suggestions tips for cool app or advertisers, or just feel like bouncing some ideas please get in touch with us ;-)

InfluAds is disrupting advertising by focusing on quality for people that care. This, won’t be the last ;-)

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/monetize-your-desktop-and-web-apps-with-premium-ads.html/feed 1 founders@influads.com http://www.influads.com/blog/founders-at-influads.html http://www.influads.com/blog/founders-at-influads.html#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:50:33 +0000 Anibal Damião http://blog.influads.com/?p=576 There’s a few people that I personally follow religiously and Brad Feld is one of them.

When you plot VCs on a matrix where awesome and accessible are the axis, Brad ranks high. He’s one of my personal favorites source of knowledge and inspiration. Forget about adding a third dimension around hustle: my theory is that there’s some gMail plug-gin that this guy has attached to his brain…

He’s one of the key insane drives of one of the cool tech clusters in the US (Boulder), one of the guys behind TechStars and a lot of other stuff. Anyway…

then this came into my Twitter stream..

 

..pointing to a short post on Brad’s blog.

 

Making it short, follow his advice and do like us: founders@influads.com is available to you.

This complements our general email (info@influads.com), our email for advertisers/sales (advertisers@influads.com) and publishers (publishers@influads.com) and. Publishers usually puts existing publishers in contact with their specific Community Manager.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t reach us and bounce ideas more often: we love to give fast feedback and have an huge respect for your inquiry so using these emails may allow you start bouncing ideas even faster.

 

PS: I’ll share some thoughts about my favorite followship one day ;)

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/founders-at-influads.html/feed 0 Redesigning InfluAds, by @StudioTundra http://www.influads.com/blog/redesigning-influads-by-studiotundra.html http://www.influads.com/blog/redesigning-influads-by-studiotundra.html#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:33:08 +0000 Anibal Damião http://blog.influads.com/?p=490 Image.1 Image.2 Image.2 Image.3 Image.4 Image.5 Image.6 Image.7 Image.8 Image.9 Image.11 Image.12 Image.13 influAdsLogo Image.2 Image.3 Image.4 Image.5

We launched the new InfluAds brand back in June and we invited our friends from Studio Tundra to make it happen. This is their account of the process since many people have been praising our design across the web.

 

Working closely with Anibal, InfluAds CEO we set about our initial challenge of how to go about creating a strong, memorable brand for a business that sells a service, a service that has the word ‘minimal’ embedded firmly in it’s beliefs, a service that offers up little visual reference or tangible imagery.


The Solution

With the desire to solidify the brand we began from scratch, and set about creating a basic graphic identity, and style combined with a new confident tone-of-voice. As for the challenge of clear visual reference we took into consideration that the core of the InfluAds business is built around the idea of ‘crowd sourced’ advertising and chose to focus on the communities of curators that InfluAds work with. Thus we set about creating a graphical universe based on icons. The icons were designed to not only be the driving visual influence, but also a distinct User Interface system.

 

 

 

 

The Logo-mark

There was a strong desire from InfluAds to move away from a purely typographic logo, as they had had previously, in favor of a logo that had a strong logo mark that could maybe be used on it’s own.

We chose to focus on the ‘Ads’ part of the name and set about creating a stylised A. A few options were entertained using various abstract but memorable A’s, before we settled on an A that is iconic and creates a feeling of togetherness.

 

 

 

The Icons

Very early on when we had decided to focus on the use of icons, we had the idea to create and incorporate an all-encompassing key-visual, that utilized the brand logo mark whilst featuring the collaborative nature of the curator icons. The chosen ‘A’ thus lent itself perfectly to the idea of the key-visual.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Typography

With the intention for the concept to use dominant typography as part of the visual language, we early on the process opted for a classic condensed headline font. At the concept stage we working with DINSchrift 1451 Engschrift, but as we began implementing the designs we opted for a web-based font, and thus chose Atrament for it’s similar condensed, headline style. We chose Helvetica as a complimentary system font.

 

 

 

 

The Colour Palette

The use of colour had to be bold but simple, hence we opted for a soft red which is complimented by 4 shades of grey and of course white. In the instance of the website we of colour is such that we have created a UX system of colour coding different areas of the website.

 

 


The new brand launched late June and has so far been met with a great response both from a business sense, and feedback regarding the overall design. The brand as we hoped is beginning to solidify InfluAds in it’s competitive market, and through it’s nature can be grown and adapted to future needs.

 

 

 

The InfluAds crew have been very pleased through the way our work happened. It was a very interesting challenge to work on a very marked identity while exploring an UX/UI that would fit our needs, involving a lot of sweat that may be the subject of a new blog post. The outcome is one of the best work we’ve done so far and even if we intent to make some improvements, we know that this identity is very strong and adaptable to our future needs.

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/redesigning-influads-by-studiotundra.html/feed 0 A piece of awesomeness landed in our mailbox: Data Visualization Book VisualComplexity.com http://www.influads.com/blog/new-data-visualization-book-by-manuel-lima-visual-complexity.html http://www.influads.com/blog/new-data-visualization-book-by-manuel-lima-visual-complexity.html#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:25:21 +0000 Anibal Damião http://blog.influads.com/?p=553 The pleasure of working with awesome quality publishers is strongly attached to the learning and opened horizons driven by their valuable content.like Visual Complexity is a clear example of that.

Manuel Lima (@mslima), is the guy behind it, a visual explorer on mapping complex networks which help us to understand not only the world around us but also the most intricate web of interactions that shape the human body.

InfluAds HQ just got on our mailbox an awesome book by Manuel: Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (which you can buy at Amazon) explores the work of incredibly beautiful visualizations. It was quite an artistic and aesthetic revelation by itself to some of us! They truly capture your eye immediately and one gets immensely impressed by each image presented in the book. Complex beauty and an awesome experience that we just started digesting!

Manuel explores often how visualization can quickly turn into a form of art since art is all about not leaving you indifferent and these amazing book does achieve that. In the book networkism is described as a new conception of art, stretching as far as our scientific eye can take us and embracing all scales of human understanding, from atoms, genes, and neurons to ecosystems, the planet, and the universe.

We can only recommend this awesome reading experience and invite you to follow the Visual Complexity blog. Visual Complexity is part of our small but awesome Data Visualization network, where a few other very interesting publishers can be found.

 

These are two gorgeous examples of data visualization representing traffic in Lisbon, a city that share some links between Manuel and us since both Manuel and Anibal (our founder & CEO) are Portuguese. We even got some inspiration from Lisbon for our 404 page ;-)

 

 

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/new-data-visualization-book-by-manuel-lima-visual-complexity.html/feed 1 A new Advertising Network focusing on Branding & Identity http://www.influads.com/blog/a-new-advertising-network-focusing-on-branding-identity.html http://www.influads.com/blog/a-new-advertising-network-focusing-on-branding-identity.html#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:31:31 +0000 Anibal Damião http://blog.influads.com/?p=477 While designers focus on  multiple fields of activity, Branding and Identity is often a common denominator.

Being a common interest to all design fields but a specialty by itself we decided to launch a new Advertising Network focusing on top publisher content around Branding & Identity. Our publishers are key players in this field and their blogs are top inspiration sources in this field. We are pleased to announce guys like David Airey, Logo Bird, Tundra Blog, Identity Designed and a few others announcing soon.

This network is a sub-network of the Design network. This basically means that advertisers can choose to run campaigns that are focusing on the wider Design community or pay a small premium to focus on this topic only.

As always, we are open to any feedback from you and welcoming new publishers on an on-going basis so apply today.

]]> http://www.influads.com/blog/a-new-advertising-network-focusing-on-branding-identity.html/feed 0