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).

Technorati Tags: AdJuggler, thruport, advertising, ads, display ads, online advertising

No subject is more controversial to a group of web professionals than Web Statistics. The advertising industry is still a little sore with us after we promised early on that Web Stats would give them all that invaluable information they could never get from TV, Radio or Print. This was not a lie, per se, as some sectors are able to mine tremendous amounts of quality information from their web traffic, session login, and cookie data. For most of us, however, the reality has fallen far short of the promise. Continue Reading »

What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.

Here’s a truism - Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.

In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.

• Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
• Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
• Interactive Media talks back
• Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
• You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)

I will be wrapping up the CDN segment today with a look at LimeLight Networks. Limelight’s technology is similar to other CDN’s available on the market. A bit too similar, as they just lost a big patent violation case filed by Akamai. Shares are down since the announcement, and things are looking grim in Arizona. So why are we even talking about them?

Customers: LimeLight has Microsoft, one of the largest clients in the Content Distribution game. The XBOX 360 is a media sponge with a loyal, content craved fan base. When you serve up the largest online market for console games in the US, it means something. So the fact that they just signed last year Sony, the soon to be second largest online console market, gives this company some serious clout. Enough to say that either on their own or though a buy-out, LimeLight will be around in the future.

Their Services: Much like any other CDN, LimeLight offers its customers Content Delivery. This is no different than CacheFly’s service, maybe better situated and built out, but the same offering. Unlike other CDNs, LimeLight also supports a proper Streaming Service for its customers (see previous CacheFly post for reference). It follows up its service with an a-la-carte offering of options in its Custom Service. Here you can dedicate servers and control specific option. These are much needed options in the CDN market. Other players in the market have horizontal offerings that go way beyond what most B2Bs needs for their content. LimeLight is playing in your space.

Having said all that, these are the issues and why I think you are still okay with LimeLight.

The Patent Dispute: According to a PC World article, the patent violation deals with Global Hosting system only and not the CDN portion of their business. The Massachusetts U.S. District Court has ruled that LimeLight did not violate Akamai’s CDN patents, as was originally claimed in the suit, only the global hosting. Long of the short of it is, they have a valid CDN business. Going in with eyes open.

Liquidity: Choosing a CDN parter doesn’t mean you are picking out china patterns together. Content is fluid, easily redirected. Using LimeLight now does not preclude you from moving to someone else in the near future. They use one-year contracts, but those become null in the event of an injunction anyway, so as long as they can meet the terms of the SLA (Service Level Agreement) you have little to worry about.

Personal Take: Litigation aside, this company hits a sweet spot right now. My personal experience with LimeLight is limited, but I have heard good things about their customer service from friends in the biz who use them. Their price points are not published, lending to a more traditional model of molding offerings and prices to individual customers. Numbers that I have seen put simple FLV HTTP progressive downloads under one and a half dollars a Gig. Your mileage may vary. In my opinion that number is competitive. The judgment of $45 million against them is concerning, though an appeal is possible. This company has a $100 million yearly revenue stream and enough major players to continue to run their business. Short on an injunction against what they do today on the CDA side, I think they should be considered a player in the B2B space.

In previous posts here and here I have discussed Content Delivery Networks in general. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper.

CacheFly is a price-point based Content Deliver Network provider that has positioned itself as the CDN of first consideration for small businesses and first time adopters. Their business strategy seems to reflect this on their website by openly promoting prices, something few other CDNs do. They seem to have aggressively positioned their services into the larger pool of start-ups, cost conscious companies, and focused industries who need fewer services. This could make them a good partner to consider for a B2B company looking to start out with a CDN. I have a different opinion, which you can read under ‘Personal Take’.

Their moniker is ‘Stop Hosting - Start Delivering’ which may mean something to their core audience but to this network engineer is a distinction without a difference. It may be a reference to their more fixed package service offerings; a unique feature of what I will term a discounted CDN service. Many CDNs will try to mold packages of their offerings into solutions that are meant to apply broadly for specific customers. CacheFly seems to have taken a different approach, whereby customers often know what they want and need and simply select the package of services that fits. For companies more traditionally comfortable with solution providers than technical sales reps, this can be a bit jarring. Many online service providers are using this model, however, so it does behoove you to look closer at this style of partnership.

CacheFly has four categories of service: Software Downloads, Web Performace, Streaming, and Podcasting. Each of these categories uses the foundational technique of distributed hosting servers, discussed in the first post. A demonstration of how CacheFly applies the technology can be seen here. A deep discussion on how the TCP stack handles windowing would great fun, and I welcome anyone to email me if you are looking for more technical explanations on how it all works. They have a light-weight crib on the subject to get you started.

Software Downloads - This service is what you would think it is. If you have files that you want to get to your user base you usually put them up somewhere on your site. The larger the files become, the larger the number of files and the more people downloading them all add up to high bandwidth usage on our host site. That high bandwidth may both cost you excessively if you are over a threshold or delay your customers significantly in downloading the files.

Website Performance - All websites are not created equal. The prevailing trend in websites recently has been to offer constantly updated content, backended by a database and a Content Management System (CMS) For sites like these, CDNs are not of much help. If, however, your site is of a more static nature you can some or all of the pages hosted at the CDN for rapid response times. Many B2B have small, flash based sites that can greatly benefit from a CDN’s hosting network.

Streaming Media - See my earlier post for information on Streaming Media and where it can be used. Here, CacheFly is offering Progressive Downloads as their service for streaming, which is a bit of a misnomer in my book. Still, with the popularity of YouTube using HTTP Progressive, their core market likely has also focused on that type of video offering so it makes some sense.

Podcasting - Not much different than Streaming Media or Software Downloads. Here the target file is either audio or audio/video.

Personal Take As this is a review site, I like to interject my personal opinion of the products and services I review. CacheFly is a well priced option. Pricing is available here. There are lower priced CDNs, but none I would consider as reputable. I have personally used the CachFly technology recently and have had good results with the hosting. There is a downside with them, however. As is common with discounted service providers, their customer support is mediocre at best. Email only options for contact are, in my opinion, acceptable for only a smaller subset of technically savvy customers. Even the emails were delayed in response, indicating to me an over subscribed support system. They handle very large tech podcasts, like Diggnation from Revision3. The success of these shows may be over inflating their customer base, I don’t know. My personal recommendation is to not try CacheFly as your first introduction to a CDNs. If you are a veteran, then they will save you money. For all others, the waters are just too choppy to be doing it without a reliable life jacket.

Addendum (4/17/08) - CacheFly does have 24/7 phone support. Customers using their customer portal, as we were, did not see this option. This has now been fixed.

Need Help with Choosing a CDN for your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

Your customers are becoming impatient. The purchasing manager for CrowCo wants to see your newly updated online presentation, so she hits the ‘play’ button on the video viewer embedded in your demo site. At first nothing happens. A small graphic spins in the lower corner of the screen to stall for time while the browser downloads enough visual and audio data to begin a progressive start. The customer fidgets. After as short as three seconds, she becomes bored and looks around her desktop for something else to do while she waits. Finally the video begins. The manager settles in and refocuses her attention. This lasts all of thirty seconds at which point the video buffer runs empty, the video stalls and the customer gives up.

Our tolerance for delays online has become unreasonably short. The success of YouTube in the online video market has eroded what little patience we had with content delivery times. Online consumers already expect video services to provide instant starts and they are noticeably disappointed when a company falls short of that mark. This comes at a time when video is becoming the goto tool for communicating information in compelling ways. It has the capacity to captivate your online audience like no other medium.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exploded into market in the late 90’s to tackle this special problem of content delivery time. Akamai began life as a website caching company, back when sites were finding their highly stylized, intensely graphical web pages were slow to load. The solution, put simply, was to copy the content onto many internet hotspots that were closer to the web surfer. Like an expressway, once Akamai was able to reroute your page request to the nearest data center, they could serve up the content with much shorter delays. Fast forward 10 years and little has changed in the CDN world. The technology has improved, but their goal is still to get your content as close to the web viewer as possible. This means video hosted on a CDN has a much greater chance of starting right away and finishing without buffering issues.

In following posts I will discuss some of the services that a CDN can provide your B2B company. I will also review two CDN networks, Cachefly and LimeLight Networks.

Technorati Tags: video, content delivery networks, CDN, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

You’ve seen the tags that you can add to your Flickr pictures, YouTube videos, blog posts, submissions to Digg, etc. These are important because they change how we can find and use information:

Why is tagging important? Because you no longer to have to “file” information in one “folder.” Information can be tagged with multiple keywords or keyphrases and then “exists” within these multiple places. Usually you can search for information based on words included within it, meta information (usually invisible information used to describe the type of information), and the keywords. This allows multiple ways to find information and usually results in a more satisfying search experience (more - we still have a long way to go).

Tagging on a customer-centric website allows your visitors to determine how to organize your information (instead of you), which leads to a more satisfying experience (so they’re more likely to come back). Tagging can also be used to tie various pieces of content together which you can use to show your customers what other people tagged with the same tags, most popular content, etc. which also gives your customers a sense of community.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, tagging, tags, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting