Continuing the web advertising thread, we are going to look at an Ad Hosting service provider.
ThruPort Technologies, the company behind the AdJuggler ad hosting service, was started in 1999 by Bruce Waldack of digitalNation fame. Bruce founded digitalNation in ’91, which was early enough in the dedicated server space to gain market share and grow it to one of the largest players in dedicated hosting at the time. In 1999 he sold digitalNation to Verio and started ThruPort the same year. AdJuggler was launched as one of ThruPorts first named services. As ad hosting services go, AdJuggler is well known in community. There are a few competitors to AdJuggler on the market, mainly because hosting ads itself is not a high technical feat to accomplish. That having been said, reliability and reputation carry a ton of weight in the advertising game and AdJuggler currently seems to have both.
AdJuggler offers up its service in three flavors. For the Enterprising web provider, Adjuggler will sell a license to run their code at your hosting location on your equipment. Ill get into why that is a great option later on. They also offer the traditional Turnkey service where all hosting and storage remains within their location, you simply link up a JavaScript tag on your site to pull the ads down. Lastly, they are available as consultants and API solutions for the roll-your-own crowd. Having worked with the guys at AdJuggler on integration projects with their API, I can say that they do know a thing of three about serving up web ads.
The technology behind their service is, as I said before, basic stuff. Basic is not a bad thing, especially when you have a solid foundation of hosting experience backing you up through ThruPort Technologies. While hosting ads is the foundation, reporting clicks and impressions is where the real work is done. They do a nice job of providing many reporting options for you at the web application. For that extra special reporting itch, the API is available through authenticated SOAP. I like to combine my AdJugger statistics with my registered user information from my web app and my traffic logs from the Apache server. The API lets me pull that information down easily and store it locally in an aggregated format. The Enterprise solution is a cool option for sites that are big enough to conduct pre-processing on their ads before sending them out to the reader which can increase cache-worthiness of the page as well as compression and optimization of the media files. It also makes the stats and the workflow a whole lot easier to tie into your system.
Price: AdJuggler charges by the impression. They do not provide pricing information publicly on their web site though Jonathan Rivers, Executive Vice President of Ad Juggler, has indicated to me that their contracts start at a $.04 CPM range (CPM is cost per Thousand impressions, think Roman Numeral M).
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