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AdJug, the advertising marketplace launches in UK

Normally I don’t do press releases as 99% of the time I find them dull and there are a lot that just don’t interest me. However I got an email today from Satish Jayakumar about his new project AdJug which I thought was interesting.

So what is AdJug? Well its a service where you can either buy or sell ads on a CPC or CPM basis. The service operates in 2 ways, you can either nominate a specific site to place your ads on or you can pick a certain category, say finance and choose to have your ads displayed on the sites within that category.

For me as an advertiser, the benefits of this type of ad marketplace is that you have total control and transparency over where traffic is coming from and how much you pay for it.

As a publisher again, I have total control over the costs so I can determine how much I want to charge advertisers and exactly what type of ads I want to show. The auction of your ad space continues even after the asking price has been met therefore increasing the value of the space over time, also cool.

So….4 reasons why AdJug is cool

1. The key selling point about AdJug is that for the first time, publishers can sell their traffic directly to big agency buyers.
2. It’s pretty much based on what advertisers have always wanted… a way to buy more of the good stuff and get less of the crap traffic… which ad networks don’t allow them to do.
3. From an media agency’s viewpoint, it makes sense to use a marketplace because there is sufficient click volume available to make it worth their while.
4. From a publishers point of view… you get a direct relationship with the advertiser and your bid is based on your conversion rate for that advertiser… No longer can the bid price/return be affected because the ad network did a deal with some spam, dodgy traffic partner.

So that’s the service in a nutshell, the people behind it are Satish, who was part of the Espotting and later founded Nixxie.com, which grew turnover to more than £15m in 3 years. And Michael Stephanblome who is a former Marketing Director of eBay Germany and MD of Gumtree.com. Here they are….

While chatting to Satish I recommended that they launch an affiliate/referral program whereby if a user signed up from say this blog, then I would get a cut of their ad spend or commissions. It turns out that this is in the project plan but not live yet. However he did tell me that if you refer an advertiser to AdJug you currently get 100% of that advertisers spend on your site for the first 3 months, they take no commission. Sweet.

Nearly forgot, they just received $2 million investment from Balderton Capital, a leading international venture capital firm. The investment, which also includes participation from Espotting founder Seb Bishop, will be used to accelerate the company’s growth and enhance product development. TradeDoubler Vice President, Rene Rechtmann, has agreed to act as an advisor and join the board of AdJug. The Company will initially focus on the UK market but plans expand into Europe.

What I’m listening to right now: Olivia ft Missy Elliott – “Cherry Pop” LOVE this record! When is the official UK release?

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Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.