Last night we released version 1.0 of the BuyAds.com marketplace! What started off last year as a prototype became a successful experiment, and it was time to upgrade. We have been itching to do some basic upgrades, and heard loud and clear you guys were waiting too

There’s been a few attempts at open ad marketplaces over the years, with most of them failing to meet expectations and shutting down. We humbly think we’ve got some great ideas about why they failed and where BuyAds can finally make the difference and we keep marching forward – but that involves some experimentation, and the world’s not going to change overnight.

For example, included in this release is open searching. Search is actually a really hard thing to get right. We think we got a decent baseline, but it will improve over time and we’d ask for your patience and help!

We’d love to know what you think!

Some highlights of the new changes:

All new visual styling – because sometimes you need a new coat of paint. It’s unusual to see a solid blue background, but we like it. What do you think?

Expanded education pages explaining what BuyAds is, how it works, why it’s different than ad networks, etc. Examples here and here.

Making it easier to find the right websites – search, full IAB categorization, see similar tags or categories, etc.

Improved the website “player cards”. You can now quick expand each one to make the window shopping experience faster, with quick one-click add to cart! Just click the blue “Details” button on a player card to expand it.

Completely redesign the profile pages for groups and websites. We moved the ad inventory up to the top and made it clear and quick what each website wanted to sell. We also added better categorization and metrics, with plans to add more in the near future.

Adding items to your campaign (cart) and the checkout process is drastically streamlined. You can now just “throw” things in your cart, and then configure everything at once like one big campaign. But don’t worry – you can still dig in to each items in your campaign to tweak creatives, tracking URLs, and more.

 Go on, start shopping!

Very soon we’ll be launching a whole new redesign for inside the isocket.com / buyads.com product. We wanted to do a better job of giving people a heads up about product changes, so here’s a tasty preview!

(Update November 10th: It’s live!)

This new version covers everything you see once you log into the app: dashboard, account setup, profiles, inventory, order management, and so on. It does not include the public face of BuyAds (the directory, website profile pages, and cart/buying) but those areas are already being redesigned and we hope to take it live in early December. (Have a request? Let us know!)

We are super excited about this! There are pieces of inside the product we’ve been itching to update for some time. We’re continually striving to improve and through excellent feedback from our awesome community we think this is a big step up.

There were a few main things we wanted to accomplish in the redesign:

• Always & easily know if you need to take any actions. Ad orders have a life cycle which need human involvement from time to time (like approving an order), and we know it could get confusing about who needed to do what and when.
• Make it easier to see at a glance what you’ve sold or bought. 
• Bring everything related to an ad campaign order onto one page, the Order page. Metrics, payments, changing creatives… everything in one place makes it easier to manage a given order.
• Clearly show the relationships between different entities like groups and properties. Lets say you’re a publisher with one website… simple enough. But if you manage multiple websites under one group (e.g. AOL Tech includes TechCrunch & Engadget) it was a little disorganized. That’s been cleaned up to show that a Group owns Properties, a Property owns Inventory (ad zones), Inventory can have multiple remnant and pricing options, and so on.
• Overall look and feel upgrades. Pretty pixels make our <3 warm.

Here’s some sneak peeks!

Love it? Hate it? We’re working hard to make the best product you’ve ever used in advertising, so please let us know what you think! (P.S. all the data in these screen shots is fake demo data)

Everything has been touched in this new version, starting with the high level organization. For publishers, things are still broken up between Orders and Inventory, but everything beneath that has been reorganized.

The dashboard is a lot more useful now. It shows aggregated metrics, active orders, and any important actions you need to take.

Inventory is now organized vertically, meaning you start with your group (if you have multiple websites) and can drill down into a specific property and then into specific ad zones on that property.

Group:

Property:

Orders:

On your main orders page you’ll see an aggregated metrics chart, quick summaries of your active / running / pending campaigns, and then a nice list of orders.

Order details:

This is the area that has been the most improved in the new version. Orders can be complicated things – who pays whom when, what if dates need to change, the publisher needs to approve a new creative, and so on. We know the old version could get confusing, so we started from scratch on this page.

You’ll notice a very clear progress bar up top, plus status messages for both the campaign and payment. Things change as the order progresses – for example, when the ad is ready to run it will show the publisher the “order specific ad tag” they can use to traffic the campaign. Or when the campaign is running it will show the metrics specific to that campaign!

Better Order Fulfillment

Order Fulfillment is one of the coolest isocket features that some publishers still don’t know about. It makes it easy for publishers to create their own orders – whether its an in-house or test order, for an advertiser that you closed a deal with over the phone, etc. We made it easier to find and use!

What do you think? Cheers!

Your website is your product. You deliver great content and experience, and in exchange people take the time to visit you. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how awesome yet fragile that is.

One of the benefits of direct ad sales is knowing exactly who you’re doing business with. Advertisers have the comfort of knowing where their ad will be (and particularly won’t be), and the publisher knows what they’ll be putting in their user’s faces.

Bad things can happen without this moderated process. Nasty things like malware can infect visitors, an ad for a new car might show up on a website that catalogs drunk driving incidents, or a competitor might hijack your brand…

With Apologies to Federated Media

Federated Media was a popular advertising network founded in 2005. Many of you are familiar with or used FM.

The major tech blog TechCrunch was isocket’s first publisher. They left FM to switch over to isocket after many months of publicized disagreements between TC and FM. In what has become well known within certain advertising/startup circles, our startup was introduced to the world via a blog post from Michael Arrington titled “So Long Federated Media, And Thanks For All The Fish.” Over two years later, we still have people calling us remembering that story.

We’ve been honored that the trend continues as more and more publishers leave older school rep-firms like FM and switch over to isocket. We’ve heard over time that the folks at FM don’t like us very much because of this.

So we never expected John Battelle – the Founder and former CEO of FM who is a justifiably respected guy in the web world – to allow our isocket advertisement to run on his blog. Yet the next day…

*image doctored for size

That was two weeks ago. Our ad says “Self-Service Ads Power by isocket”. Right above the nameless ads from FM. If that isn’t trolling… we don’t know what is.

Protect Your Brand

We didn’t do this to be mean, and we expect it to be removed after this post. We did it to prove a point. Your brand and customer experience is important – cherish it and protect it. Bad stuff will always leak through, but at the minimum you must be aware of it and proactively try to keep the bad stuff out.

It’s for this reason that no advertising campaign bought through isocket ever goes live on a website until the publisher has reviewed and approved it.

On a whim, we even added a feature to isocket that let publishers show nothing at all in their ad space if it was unsold. So instead of filling it with something remnant like AdSense (which is often a culprit of really bad ad placements), the ad space would just collapse down and disappear. We’ve been happy that it’s an increasingly popular feature.

The Good and the Bad

There are limitless examples of very bad ad placements. Even just today, a relatively mild but unfortunate placement on CNN’s homepage:

But sometimes there are really awesome coincidences, like this shot of the former IMF chief:

If you’re looking for a cool source of good ad placements, check out the Cool Ads section of Oddee. Here’s their 15 worst ad placements ever.

One of isocket’s great features for publishers is the ability to control what shows up in your ad space when it’s unsold. Don’t want to be forced into using a gray “advertise here” banner? No worries, change it.

Today we improved this system by adding support for multiple remnant choices. So for any given ad zone, you can run multiple ad networks and place holders. They will all rotate evenly. Pretty simple, right?

The four basic remnant options:

1. A gray “advertise here” banner. The default option. We always suggest using this as part of your remnant. It’s a great tangible way to let your audience know “psst, you can click and buy me!” – it’s important to let potential advertisers know you are open for business!
2. Custom placeholders. You can upload your own image with a custom landing URL. Some publishers use this to display customized branded “advertise here” banners. Like this great example… 
3. You can plug in any third party ad code / ad tag. When our ad server says “OK, no ad is sold, so show a remnant one instead” we will call whatever ad tag you entered. The basic use case is plugging in a remnant ad network like AdSense. This can be a great way for publishers to keep making the *cough* pennies they are making from ad networks in between their premium sold ads.
4. Show nothing. Wait, nothing? Yeah! A growing number of publishers are saying “if I haven’t sold a premium ad, I don’t want to show anything at all. No point diluting my website with crappy ads just to make $0.05.” If you chose this, isocket will show nothing and “collapse” the ad zone, almost as if it wasn’t there.

How to create multiple remnant banners:

When you create a new zone, you still pick one remnant option. This is your default remnant.

Once an ad zone is created, click “Remnant” under the right zone in the main list. This shows the 1 or more remnant banners running for that ad zone. You can add, subtract, etc. They will all rotate evenly. Please note it can take up to 15 minutes for your changes to be seen live on your website.

Twitching with joy to announce two awesome things today: the launch of our premium ad marketplace BuyAds.com and an industry-first partnership with Google’s DoubleClick ad server!

The folks here at isocket are oddly passionate about making advertising sales suck less. Our self-serve ad sales application is thriving and has helped move the industry forward by making it super simple for advertisers to buy a direct campaign and for publishers to configure and sell their inventory (and all for 0% commissions!)

Now the next logical step is to make a “shoppable” marketplace for advertisers. Well, it’s finally here.

BuyAds.com is the easiest way to buy premium ads on the web’s best sites!

BuyAds.com (sweet domain right?) is our new premium marketplace featuring ad inventory of hundreds of the web’s best properties. You can pick and configure the ads you want, add them to your cart, checkout, and you’re done!

We’re experimenting with different ways to make it easy for advertisers. Rather than an open search box, we’ve tagged websites into verticals like Fashion, Gaming, Tech and Entertainment. We know it’s really tough for advertisers to find the websites they want to advertise on. We get calls from people searching through Google and going one by one by one for the right places to advertise. Stop!

BuyAds is a hand curated list of the best sites. And we’ve even included websites that aren’t powered by isocket. You can’t add them to your cart, but at least it helps you move in the right direction.

So what kind of sites are on BuyAds.com? Here’s a sample list:

• TechCrunch
• The Cheezburger Network (iCanHasCheezburger, failBlog, The Daily What)
• The Spartz Network (OMG Facts, Taste of Awesome, smartphOWNED)
• LOOKBOOK.nu
• What I Wore
• The Blog of Tim Ferriss
• GameZebo
• VentureLoop
• Vator.tv
• and many more…

We’re very excited about what we could do with BuyAds.com and it’s definitely the “first draft” in what we hope becomes the number one destination for premium advertising. We’d love to have you check it out and if you have any feedback for how we could improve it, we’re all ears!

Google and isocket partner to bring self-service and guaranteed ad sales to any publisher using Google’s DFP ad server!

For the last year Google and isocket have been locked in a lab cooking up a batch of awesome. Many publishers use DoubleClick’s Dart for Publishers ad server (part of which was formerly called Google Ad Manager). But unfortunately those ad servers don’t make it easy enough to do direct ad sales.

For the first time in the industry publishers on DFP can seamlessly integrate a direct sales tool into their ad server – avoiding the need to daisy chain ad servers together, work with messy ad tags, etc.

When a publisher using the integration approves an order in isocket, we send it directly into their DFP server no differently than if an ad ops person entered it in by hand. Except in this case its auto-magic.

We’ve already soft-launched this plugin with a handful of our publishers. Now we’re looking for more – if you want to use the DFP plugin, please contact us.

And don’t forget – isocket is totally free for publishers until they sell their first ad. Why not apply today?

We’re giddy like little school girls with Beiber Fever to let you know that isocket has a shiny new free trial and we lowered two of our monthly prices!

It’s more than a trial, really – isocket is totally free until you sell your first ad! No time limits, no credit cards, yet fully functional and fully awesome. Start selling your own ads completely risk free.

Free trials are awesome aren’t they? Yeah, we tend to think so, too. It practically erases the fear of having buyer’s remorse simply by removing the buying until, you know, you actually like what you’re about to pay for. Yep, free trials are pretty much the bomb.

We lowered the price on our basic tier and added a new one!

isocket’s lowest entry tier was $49/month for up to 1 million ad impressions. That was a great price, but we thought we could do better. So we shaved off $10 down to $39 per month. Compare that to a commission-based service, and you could put an average of $750 more in your pocket each month.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised to see some lower traffic websites do really well on isocket. Some as low as 30,000 – 50,000 page views per month. To show our love for the bootstrapping bloggers, we’ve created a new tier: up to 500,000 impressions per month for $19. Yeah, $19.

You can check out all of the plans we offer over here on our handy-dandy pricing page (office dogs included) and if you have any questions feel free to leave us a note in the comments below and we’ll get you any details you need. Cool? Cool.

Why all this awesomeness and how does the free trial work?

Why all of this talk about free trials, you ask? Great question. We did this because being successful with direct sales doesn’t happen overnight for many websites. Selling your own ads is like selling a product – and just like with any other new product that you might offer for sale, you need to package it well, promote it, bring customers in the door, etc. And that can take time.

The free period is fully functional and has no time limits. It could last 3 days or 3 months, up until you sell your first ad. When you get your first order, you’ll activate your account and put in your credit card. Then you can run the first order and our monthly fee will begin.

So we don’t want anyone to pay for our product until they know they like it and it provides them value. We believe that strongly in our mission. And we believe more websites should at least have the chance to give direct sales a try without any risk.

To our current customers: you were automatically rolled over into the best fit for you. If you haven’t sold anything yet, you’re on free trial. And because we love you so much, if you signed up within the few weeks prior to this change we put a refund on your CC.

Request an invitation and get started risk free!

So now there’s literally no reason why any publisher who wants to step up their direct ad sales shouldn’t give us a try. We’re free to use and we’re currently powering sites like TechCrunch, I Can Has Cheesburger, Digital Trends, Lookbook.nu and Gamezebo. If you think you’re ready to give us a shot, it’s super easy:

1. Apply here: http://isocket.com/apply
2. Get approved and set up your ads.
3. ??????? (but at least it’s free!)
4. Profit!

Always free for advertisers

Remember all you marketers – isocket is always completely free for you to use. The only thing you pay is the actual cost of your campaign, 100% of which goes directly to the publisher. And we’ve got some great tools baking in the isocket kitchen that we’ll announce shortly

When you talk to most advertising companies you’ll quickly lean that they don’t like to give up control of how the money flows through their system. The reasoning behind this is simple — the more that your money goes through their system the more money they make off of the commissions they’re charging you. Advertising companies taking a cut of your advertising sales  is more common than not, which usually makes getting your hands on the money you’re owed as a publisher a little difficult at best.

Here at isocket we want to free up  your cash flow as much as possible and we never want to become an inefficiency when it comes to the money you’re owed. This is why we don’t take a commission and why we made the very core decision a long, long time ago to charge a small, flat  monthly fee instead. It’s easier for you and any other publisher to manage, it’s predictable and it allows for you to get paid the way that you feel is best for your business.

This brings me to why I’m writing this post in the first place. Starting now isocket has made it even easier for you to get paid from an advertiser and we’ve done it by actually removing something from the equation — ourselves. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ll explain.

There’s an option called Order Fulfillment within isocket that allows our publishers to create an order for an advertiser and it’s used a lot. Up until now there has only been 3 options for how the advertiser would pay for the order: 1. credit card, 2.  check or 3. bank transfer. Each of these options send the money through our system (commission-free) and is paid out on the first business day of the following month, which works fine for a majority of our publishers. But, some of them (like local sites) would rather have the advertiser pay them directly since they have personal relationships with their advertisers. Meaning, why would a publisher have an advertiser send their money to isocket so that we could then send it back to the publisher a couple of weeks later when the publisher could just as easily grab a check from the advertiser at a local coffee shop?

Makes sense, right?

This new option that’s now available is labeled “Ignore, handle independently” and it’s found in the Payment Options section in Order Fulfillment. We hope this makes getting your money even easier and that it makes your advertising world suck even less. We would love to hear any feedback that you have on this new update and if you have any other suggestions for us throw ‘em in the comments section below — we’re always listening.

Like any other product that wants to become the most awesome thing ever, isocket feels like getting feedback and ‘constructive criticism’ is super important. So important, in fact, that we have had a uservoice page since we’ve had a public page to put it on. Seriously, we even blogged about it (yeah, THAT important).

Case in point (not that you need proof), this suggestion was brought up by one of our publishers and we rolled it into the live app within just a few days. Can I get a boo yah?

Besides getting feedback we make it a high priority to answer any questions that we can regarding our product and how it can work for different types of publishers. I’m not sure if you know this or not, but if you talked to 50 different publishers who are generating revenue from ads they are probably doing it 50 different ways. When you keep this in mind, the fact that many publishers need some questions answered before they use us isn’t surprising.

To help facilitate the answering of these questions we have just rolled out live chat functionality that anyone who is browsing our website can use at any time. Even though having live chat is pretty cool, the real reason for us implementing it is that many publishers don’t know what questions they’ll have until they look over our pricing and features and we want to be there to answer the questions they have right when they need them answered.

Here’s what the live chat looks like on an external, public isocket page:

Another cool thing that we’ve done is include the live chat functionality on all of our publisher’s internal isocket pages so that if they have a question about how to set something up or if they have feedback they want to share, they can do it quick and easy.

Here’s what the live chat looks like on an internal, customer-only isocket page:

At the very least Jason and I will be standing by for live chat during our business hours (and any other time we’re available online), but if for some reason we’re not available for live chat when a question comes up the chat app turns into an email tool that allows a screenshot of the page you’re on to be sent directly to us.

We’ve already used live chat to help out a few of our current isocket publishers after only launching it a few days ago and we’ve also been able to answer questions for several other people who were looking at what we had to offer. If you want to give it a shot, feel free go to http://isocket.com and start chatting it up with us — real humans are standing by.

If you’re curious about what live chat product we’re using, it’s called SnapEngage and all of us here at isocket would highly recommend it if you’re currently looking for a solution.

Also, just so you know — we’re not completely getting rid of UserVoice — we’re going to link to it somewhere internally on isocket so that our customers can still use it to make suggestions and to keep up with the progress of new features we’re going to be rolling out.

When we launched our public beta in July, we started to promote our features and pricing for the first time. Since then we’ve made isocket more flexible and powerful, while bringing on many new publishers. We’ve listened to questions & comments we got from our customers and based on that feedback, we’ve updated some of our public pages.

The new pages state our mission more clearly: we make advertising suck less. They also succinctly lay out some of the top reasons for joining isocket.

We also split off an independent page about pricing – check it out. We simplified some of the tiers and used our awesome office dogs to add some personality (as you can tell, we love our dogs!)

For example, you can sell/serve up to 5 million ad impressions per month for only $99. Publishers switching from commission-based services are literally putting thousands more in their pocket each month, just by switching.

We think you’ll find these new pages to be clear and compelling. Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments or on twitter at @isocket!

Many new isocket publishers wonder “what does it look like for my advertisers?” – which is a great question to ask, because after all it’s your ad sales experience.

We generally recommend that you don’t create some fake orders to check out the process. It can clutter up your real data, date scheduling, etc.

So instead, we put together a ~4 minute video explaining the full process. It’s also available in the support section. Check it out!

Summary of the flow:

1. Advertiser finds your profile, either via isocket or directly from the website.
2. Checks out the group profile – brand, audience, traffic info and a menu of ad inventory.
3. Places an order for a specific ad package.
4. Seller gets email – “congrats, you sold an ad!” – sees all the order details (who bought it, the creative, etc)
5. Seller approves or rejects the order.
6. If approved, we take care of the painful parts like money and serving.
7. Buyer and seller can see metrics, change creative, and so on.