Our Latest Product Updates

It has been a wild year for Adzerk. 2010 was the un-official birth of Adzerk, we spun out of Zerk Media and launched our product in beta with a number of partners. 2011 was a year of insane growth and transition from a small bootstrapped startup to a 9 person company funded by some great investors.

This time last year Kacy (@kacyf) and I (@averyj) were hauling folding tables and chairs from my car down to one of the first new offices in the American Underground. (CED and Launchbox were already down there, but the rest was still being built out.) Being in the underground has been a tremendous advantage for us which I detailed in a post last year. We started in one of the smallest offices they have on folding chairs and a table I used for cookouts the summer before – and we are now in one of the largest offices (moving through a medium office part way through the year). I hope that 2012 causes us to move again due to continued growth – although I don’t look forward to hanging the whiteboards for the 4th time.

Here is a quick rundown of milestones throughout the year:

Jan 2011 – Move into the Underground and hire Kacy Fortner.
Feb 2011 – Andy Schrader (@andyschrader) joins as VP of Product Management.
Feb 2011 – We launch at Launch Conference in San Francisco.
Jun 2011 – Andew Moyer (@andrewmoijar) joins as Customer Experience Manager.
Jul 2011 – We close our seed round of financing with an incredible set of investors. (TechCrunch!)
Jul 2011 – Sarah Kahn (@aarahkahak) joins as an UX Engineer.
Jul 2011 – James Jeffers (@jdjeffers) joins as a Senior Engineer.
Jul 2011 – Brian Handly (@bhandly) joins as an Executive Chairman
Aug 2011 – Ron Nelson (@RonaldNelson) joins as our first Sales associate.
Sep 2011 – We complete a facelift of the Adzerk UI and launch self-signup.
Oct 2011 – We launch the Run of Network blog.
Dec 2011 – We announce adOS and the building of an ad-tech focused app marketplace. (TechCrunch again!)
Dec 2011 – The first beta users of adOS start installing apps in the app marketplace.

This doesn’t include the scores of new features as well as a complete overhaul of our development, deployment, and operations processes.

As a preview of 2012 – here are some things you can expect to see from us:

Rollout of our new pricing model.
adOS comes out of beta.
New ad code that changes what you should expect from your ad code.
Partnerships with some of the largest ad technology companies in the world.
Awesome new features baked directly into adOS.

Thanks to all of our great customers, investors, and team members for a great 2011!

-James

As we enter 2012 we’re rolling out the new pricing structure that we’ve been preparing for with many of the product changes over the last few months. As you may have read in the Techcrunch article that introduced the adOS app store, we’re offering FREE core ad serving for up to 100M impressions per month. You’ll also notice that we’ve begun referring to our ad serving platform as “adOS”. We’re excited to have a name for our ad server that fits it so well, since we think of it as an ad serving operating system for anyone to build on and integrate with.

This pricing reflects our belief that an independent, robust core ad server should be available to anyone that needs to manage ad inventory.  So for anyone that needs a basic ad server we’re offing adOS for free.  By adding the App Marketplace to adOS we’re putting you in control of what features and services you want in your ad server. You’ll see that we have apps for additional functionality (Network Management tools, Support, White Label setting, Advanced Forecasting) as well as integrations with networks and third party services like rich media providers (Expandable Banners, Push Down Banners) and retargeting providers like DataPoint. Check back often because we’re adding new apps almost every day.

What about our current customers that have been paying for ad serving?  We worked hard to come up with a pricing structure that didn’t increase prices for any of our customers. In fact, the new pricing structure is simpler and may cost you less.  If you’re serving over 100M impressions/month your pricing doesn’t change; we’ve already worked out enterprise pricing that reflects the services and features you’re using in addition to basic ad serving. If you’re serving less than 100M impressions/month then you’ll find you’re using basic ad serving with the apps you’ve been using (like the Support App) already installed.  These new apps can be installed and uninstalled at any time to Paying a $0.01 cpm with min $50 for support allows us to continue offering the best support in the industry to those that need it.

Drop us a line if you have any questions or concerns about how this affects you, we would love to hear your feedback.

Andy

Tuesday night at 10pm we will be taking the admin interface down for house cleaning, which involves adding some patches to the database.  If you’d like to stay up to date on the progress and status of this update please follow us on Twitter. Also worth noting is that there is no ad serving downtime involved.

Just a quick update that we’re doing some minor remodeling to the main menu in Adzerk. Later today you’ll see the ‘Site’ tab replaced with a new tab called ‘Inventory.’  The ‘Site’ pages will be located inside the ‘Inventory’ tab so you won’t have far to go to find your sites. You’ll also notice the ‘Publishers’ and ‘View Site Earnings’ subnavigation are removed. You can find the ‘Publishers’ menu under Network Tools and the ‘View Site Earnings’ can be seen by running a report or viewing the earnings for a specific Site.

In short, this:  

Will become this:     

We’re making this change now to clean up the navigation, and also because there are new pages coming soon to the ‘Inventory’ tab.

Also today, there are a couple of other minor improvements that you might notice:

• The size restriction is being removed from zones so you’ll be able to setup a zone and use it for any type of ad size in a site
• The header section for each page will become cleaner and more compact
• Custom reports will now include priorities and revenue. (note: revenue is added to the report if you group by flight)

I know it’s been a while since we’ve updated the product blog so we have some new posts coming soon that will detail recently added features as well as new functionality you can look forward to. So stay on the look for that in the coming days. As always, let us know if you have any product feedback by chatting/emailing support or dropping me a note directly.

-Andy

andy (at) adzerk.com

As a startup we spend a lot of time educating people about the online ad industry, whether it’s investors, new employees or potential customers. It’s always nice to be able to direct someone to a good blog or source of content that they can read in their own time to come up to speed. We’re big fans of the AdExchanger, MediaPost and Digiday because of their great content covering news and the industry as a whole but what we’ve been looking for is a great source of content that really tackled specific issues related to inventory sellers (whether they are ad networks or publishers).

This is why I’m excited to share the news that we’ve launched the Run of Network blog. We’ll be drawing heavily on the collective knowledge that employees at Adzerk have accumulated and also tapping others that have great insights selling and managing online ads. It’s our goal that you find something that makes you better at your job. Have a read and please drop us a line to let us know what you think, whether its a suggestion for an article or just feedback on something you’ve read.

- Andy

Adzerk will be returning to the Big Top and participating in Big Top 2.0 – a unique job fair where companies pitch potential employees. We participated in the event back in May and ended up hiring our totally awesome support dude Andrew Moyer.

If you are currently toiling away in a cubical farm and want to see what it’s like to work at a fast moving startup like Adzerk – come to the event and see what we and the other great companies presenting have to offer.

Check out more info here and register here.

-James

I’m excited to announce that today we are officially launching the Adzerk Customer Referral Program. The program is simple: any current Adzerk customer will receive up to $500 in credit for any new customer they refer. This is a great way for you to refer colleagues who you know would benefit from Adzerk and you get rewarded in return.

It’s easy to get started. Just send us an email to sales@adzerk.com (or to your favorite Adzerk Sales person) that includes your colleague’s contact information. That’s it!  You already talk about Adzerk — now you can get rewarded for it!

If your colleague becomes an Adzerk customer within 12 months, you’ll get 50% of their third months Adzerk bill up to $500.

We look forward to working with you and your colleagues. The larger the Adzerk community gets, the more we all benefit through networking and collaboration.

Thanks for being part of the Adzerk Universe.

With the addition of our new UX Engineer Sarah, the Adzerk interface now has a brand new look and feel to brighten up the application! After some sweat, tears, and a few broken keyboard keys we introduce you to your new interface:

Now you’re bound to go through a period of, “Oh my! Where is everything?”  But if you look closely you will see that everything is still exactly where it was before.  The only differences are cosmetic changes that we think really brighten up the app and make it easier to visually consume.

Obviously we love it but we’re really interested to know your thoughts!  Login to your account and take a look around.  Once you’ve explored the new environment reach out through the in-app chat/email feature and let us know what you think!

If you’d like to read more about what Sarah has been up to, read her previous post, Adzerk Gets a Facelift!

We value the insight and feedback we get from our customers and we are constantly working to find ways to improve our application to make it better, faster, and easier to use.
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I am proud to announce that Adzerk has raised a $650,000 seed round. By raising money we can accelerate our engineering efforts and continue to provide top-notch support to our current customers. Over the next couple of months you can expect to see Adzerk moving very quickly with both new features and new customers.

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