Daily Archives: June 9, 2009

Impact Engine, the advertising technology company that pioneered display ad business optimization, announces the launch of 14 MediaNews Group sites on the Publisher Edition of its online display ad optimization platform. Impact Engine won the larger relationship after MediaNews Group corporate noted Monterey County Herald, one of the its largest sites, had recorded increase in spec ad production by 260%. The gains were without new hiring and required minimal training to derive the benefits of the Impact Engine platform.

“Transitioning to the Yahoo! APT serving system, we needed a certified partner that met the system’s specifications and guidelines,” said Steve Bennett, Advertising Manager at Monterey County Herald. “Impact Engine’s Yahoo!-certified ad creative ensured that deploying ads into the new APT platform was seamless.”

Impact Engine has been certified as a third-party rich media vendor by the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium in March 2008, ensuring its place in an exclusive group to be able to serve ads through the Yahoo! APT platform.

“The MediaNews Group win is a prime example of how Impact Engine is delivering much needed efficiencies to the online display advertising marketplace,” said Neil Greer, the CEO of Impact Engine. “We are pleased MediaNews Group has expanded its relationship with us. As a pioneer of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium, MediaNews Group has proven time and again they are a forward thinking company.”

Prior to launching Impact Engine, Monterey County Herald was challenged with limited programming resources and limited budget for hiring and training new staff. Additionally, their advertisers wanted more control over the success of their display ad campaigns. Impact Engine enabled Monterey County Herald to shift 100% of its display ad hosting burden to Impact Engine’s robust infrastructure and in less than 20 minutes, the newspaper was able to train its non-technical sales team on how to create and edit spec ads for their advertisers. Further, Impact Engine’s self service tools for online advertisers and publishers enabled the Herald to enable their advertisers to make changes to their own ad campaigns; thus, increasing campaign success and enhancing advertiser satisfaction.

Bennett said the simplicity of creating and editing example Display ads for advertisers within Impact Engine eliminated almost all customer sales objections, as the sales team was able to react to customers’ feedback and make real-time ad edits during client meetings. “Impact Engine’s online library offers a variety of industry templates which get our clients’ creative juices flowing,” Bennett added.

Impact Engine’s new MediaNews Group clients include newspapers throughout the San Francisco Bay area, such as Chico ER, Paradise Post, and Eureka Times-Standard, just to mention a few.

About Impact Engine
Impact Engine is the leading display ad business optimization company for the online advertising industry. The company is focused on delivering efficiencies, scalability and increased ROI to Publishers, Advertisers and Agencies alike. The firm was founded by an experienced team of interactive ad agency principals, rich media veterans, and software professionals. Impact Engine enables publishers, advertisers, ad agencies, and ad networks of all sizes to leverage the fast growth and opportunities presented within the online display advertising space.

About MediaNews Group
MediaNews Group is one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States situated throughout California, the Rocky Mountain region and the Northeast. MediaNews Group is privately owned and operate 54 daily newspapers in 11 states with combined daily and Sunday circulation of approximately 2.4 million and 2.7 million, respectively.

Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it, according to Harvard research.

Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a study of 300,000 users found.

Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network.

The Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.

And most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime, the researchers found.

“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.

On a typical online social network, he said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production.

“This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the team wrote in a blog post.

Twitter is a social networking website where people can post messages of up to 140 characters – known as tweets – that can be seen by other users who subscribe to their feed.

Its growth has been described as “explosive” and it has become the poster child of social networking sites, particularly among media companies.

“Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends”
Bill Heil

Recent figures from research firm Nielsen Online show that visitors to the site increased by 1,382%, from 475,000 to seven million, between February 2008 and February 2009