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Hey Guys,
Thanks for sounding out here....
I've reached out to our ad partner and we're going to have the Best Buy pop up campaign halted for now on CrackBerry and the other sites.
For future reference and better understanding, here's some background info on it:
a) Smartphone Experts works with a third party company, NetShelter Technologies, to manage our on site advertising. They're very well known in the space, and work with a bunch of publishers in the mobile and tech field. So if you see something like this hit CrackBerry, it's not "crackberry" doing it, but it's a campaign that's coming through NetShelter. Sometimes we have good awareness of the upcoming campaigns happening on the sites (in the case where an advertiser wants to do something really targeted), and other times we just get the ads that are getting served up around the network. That's why you'll see a lot of similar types of ads running across similar types of tech sites, etc.. NetShelter is working to provide value to the advertiser - that doesn't just come from "spamming" site visitors as that's a short term thing, so they do a lot of creative stuff that I think is pretty cool from a visitor perspective. At the same time, some of the advertisers that they deal with just want to run their campaigns and know what they want to run - and that's where something like this popup campaign might show up.
b) In regards to ads like the pop up one in question (what I'll dub the "annoying" ads), they are set to only show up once per day per visitor per IP address. So if you visit crackberry on your computer, you'll only get it once in 24 hours. However if you visit on another computer (say at work, etc.) you'd see it again. Personally, I don't think once per day is that bad. Obviously some of you guys do. Advertising on the internet is a reality these days. Personally I kind of look at good ad campaigns as a sign of success of a website. Little sites don't get the big ad campaigns - successful ones do (I think it was a few weeks ago that NYtimes (or was it WSJ?) completely flipped their site design colors to all Black for a BlackBerry campaign. I thought it was crazy awesome). But I guess that's me being a fan of advertising.
c) We get that there's a fine line between effective advertising and advertising that's annoying. We've always given NetShelter our direction that we prefer to error on the conservative side (which means we make less money, but there's less threads like this in the forums). You guys might get mad at us for running some ads, but lol, you should be thanking us for a lot of the ones we haven't run
d) Regarding this campaign, so far it only served up 9,000 impressions, so not too many. Also, for those of you wondering why you haven't seen it, note that it all depends where you're located. This on is only in the US i think, so Canadians and those international won't see it.
Hope that helps explain things a bit. I can't guarantee we'll never serve up an ad that some of you find annoying (ads are going to get served up and like I said, we don't have total control over it), but I promise we'll continue to work with our advertising partners and our community here to make sure things are at a happy balance. We always take a long term approach. Short term gains at the expense of long term profitability is never a good approach.
Keep Crack'n!
Kevin08-08-11 04:53 PM
