Readers, we are excited to announce the arrival of Post Level Text Link Ads!  Post Level TLA’s offer many features that our advertisers are looking for including:

• The ability to target highly specific popular blog posts.

• Maximum of one ad below the post.

• Have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.

• Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.

• Each ad will be on a single page only.

Check out this page for more information and to browse our marketplace of Post Level TLA’s!

Bonus amounts for the eBay US tracking outage have been posted to publisher’s accounts with a posting date of 4/30. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience this caused.

Everyone likes to see a little hardware once in a while, so here’s a little peek at the heavy iron underneath AuctionAds. For the most part:

4x Dell PowerEdge 1950
2x Dell PowerEdge 2950
2x Coyote Point Equalizer 450si

For the month of April we are averaging over 60 million hits per day. Thats roughly:

750+ hits/sec at peak times (corrected)
58 gigs of Javascript per day
134 gigs of HTML per day
16 gigs of RAM cache
1.1 gigs of MySQL (yes, only)

If anyone from Sun is reading..I could put a pair of X2200s to work..

Successful Merger of Filinet and R.O.WISE Platforms Completed

NEW YORK, NY and PLANTATION, FL, April 24, 2007 – MediaWhiz Holdings, Inc. (MediaWhiz), a leading provider of performance-based online marketing services, today announced a number of new services and features for its affiliate network Filinet. The new offerings combine the strengths of MediaWhiz’s Filinet.com and R.O.WISE affiliate networks into Filinet, LLC (Filinet), to better serve its clients’ needs.

“The combined Filinet includes the best features of both platforms, as well as exciting new services our affiliates and advertisers will greatly benefit from, including an increased level of detail in our reporting,” stated Yannick Tessier, Co-President, MediaWhiz. “New features include an expanded offer display that allows affiliates to see offer recommendations based on their site profile and expanded creative types.”

“The new Filinet will make more offers available to our publishing partners and provide wider distribution to our advertising partners, all on an improved technology platform,” stated Jason Cohen, Co-President, MediaWhiz. “The two platforms have been successfully merged, and we are now focusing on completing migration of all advertiser and publisher accounts by the end of June.”

MediaWhiz, widely known for its affiliate marketing, co-registration, and lead generation services, merged in April 2006 with Plantation, Fla.-based GRS, a leading list management, email marketing and affiliate marketing company, to form one of the largest providers of integrated online performance marketing services. More recently, MediaWhiz acquired Text Link Ads, which specializes in text link advertisements; and Monetizeit, a leader in online performance-based marketing services with specialization in lead generation for the financial services, healthcare, hospitality, travel and education markets.

About Filinet
Filinet connects affiliates and advertisers in the interest of generating leads and sales on a pay-for-performance model. Filinet affiliates direct internet traffic to an advertiser’s website in order to generate an acquisition for the advertiser who pays for the traffic on a cost per visit, lead, or sale basis. Filinet works with advertisers to test and optimize creative to achieve the best results for affiliate traffic, while also handling all affiliate payments, tracking, reporting, customer service and technical support.

About MediaWhiz
MediaWhiz is a leading online marketing company delivering a fully integrated solution for brand advertisers, direct marketers and publishers by leveraging its suite of marketing services to achieve measurable results. Services include affiliate marketing, lead generation, email marketing, list management, display advertising, text link advertising and search marketing. MediaWhiz delivers more than 3 million monthly leads to over 3,000 advertisers through its database of more than 100 million consumer email addresses and relationships with over 16,000 publishers. Private equity firm Lake Capital (www.lakecapital.com) first invested in MediaWhiz in August 2005. Through acquisitions and organic growth, MediaWhiz has established its position as a leading provider of integrated marketing. More information on MediaWhiz is available at www.mediawhiz.com.

As you may or may-not be aware, the eBay US affiliate program reported experiencing tracking issues that began on Saturday April 7. These issues affect revenue share and ACRU performance. The exact scope of the issue is not fully known by eBay. When the notification first went out eBay thought the fix was going to be forthcoming. We communicated with eBay and made the decision to wait to notify our users until a fix was completed and the lost revenue credited. Unfortunately the tracking issue still hasn’t been fixed, and it doesn’t appear that a fix will be in place shortly. As a result, the credit can not be determined until the problem is resolved.

We understand your frustration in this matter and while it is not a problem with AuctionAds we are extremely frustrated as well. We fully understand that receiving a bonus credit is never the same as knowing what your real stats are. As you know our commitment to growth is our highest priority and an issue like this is crippling. eBay has assured us they are working hard on the problem, and will be fixing both the problem and the fallout. We will naturally be passing this onto users in full.

Please note that this does not affect international programs, only eBay US. At this point this is all we know. Since the exact scope of the issue is unknown, it will be impossible for us to determine the credit until eBay finishes their calculations.

Again, we apologize for this unfortunate inconvenience and hope that you’ll stick with us.

Former DoubleClick Sr. Exec. and Industry Veteran to Lead Integration, Growth of Business Units

NEW YORK, NY, April 18, 2007 – MediaWhiz Holdings, Inc. (MediaWhiz), a leading provider of performance-based online marketing services, today announced it has appointed Jonathan Shapiro as its Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Shapiro will oversee the integration of the company’s suite of marketing services (which include affiliate marketing, lead generation, email marketing, list management, display advertising, text link advertising and search marketing), as well as lead the development and launch of new and unique services that take advantage of MediaWhiz’s broad service offerings capabilities.

Mr. Shapiro was previously Chief Strategy Officer for DoubleClick, where he was responsible for setting strategy and overseeing M&A. As Senior Vice President of DoubleClick’s Abacus online division, he created DoubleClick’s data strategy and oversaw development of new online targeting products and services. Originally, Mr. Shapiro joined DoubleClick as a Vice President responsible for managing the company’s Internet Advertising Network. Most recently, he was President of Lillian Vernon Corp., responsible for management of the company and its subsidiaries; prior to that, he worked with ZelnickMedia and Ripplewood Holdings on their acquisition of Lillian Vernon Corp. Earlier in his career, Shapiro ran United Media’s Internet business featuring The Dilbert Zone; the site, a top news, information and entertainment destination, was launched in 1996 and was one of the Internet’s first profitable businesses.

“As MediaWhiz continues its efforts to grow internally and acquire new companies, we are confident Jonathan possesses the ideal combination of leadership and online marketing experience to achieve these objectives,” stated Kevin Rowe, Director of Lake Capital.

“I am thrilled to be working with MediaWhiz’s management team to further position the company as an industry leader, providing clients with one of the broadest platforms of online marketing solutions available,” added Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of MediaWhiz.

Following an investment from private equity firm Lake Capital, MediaWhiz merged in 2006 with Global Resource Systems (now WhiteDelivery) to form one of the largest providers of integrated online performance marketing services. More recently, MediaWhiz acquired Text Link Ads, specializing in text link advertisements; and Monetizeit, a leader in lead generation for the financial, consumer and healthcare markets.

About MediaWhiz
MediaWhiz is a leading online marketing company delivering a fully integrated solution for brand advertisers, direct marketers and publishers by leveraging its suite of marketing services to achieve measurable results. Services include affiliate marketing, lead generation, email marketing, list management, display advertising, text link advertising and search marketing. MediaWhiz delivers more than 3 million monthly leads to over 3,000 advertisers through its database of more than 100 million consumer email addresses and relationships with over 16,000 publishers. Private equity firm Lake Capital first invested in MediaWhiz in August 2005. Through acquisitions and organic growth, MediaWhiz has established its position as a leading provider of integrated marketing. More information on MediaWhiz is available at www.mediawhiz.com.

Make sure you stop by the Text-Link-Ads/AuctionAds booth and rap with our co-founders at SES NYC. Also don’t forget to ask for our new Awesome t-shirts!

Today is our 1-month Anniversary! What an amazing and educational first month. Now I’m not sure what other advertising networks numbers are, but getting almost 7500 publishers and paying out 5-figures within 25 days of launch seems like one heck of a start! Our publishers have already matched their March earnings in the first 5 days of April and it looks like AuctionAds will be paying out more then 10x for April than we did for March. Congratulations AuctionAds publishers and heres to the future!

Quick Stats:

23530 items won on eBay through AuctionAds
464 new users active on eBay from AuctionAds
219 countries generated traffic
1 melted MySQL server

Many online companies concentrate on marketing tactics such as SEO because they think that it is the key to being the leader in a specific online segment, but there are really many things that cause someone to be seen as the leader in a specific segment. One of the things that can lead to great success on the web is branding. If you think about the leaders in specific industries, they are well branded.

If you want to increase the value of your company, you need to brand it. Here are 4 things to consider when creating a brand or trying to brand your company:

Identity

If your logo is not unique then it is going to be hard to brand yourself. You need to make sure it is different then the competition by using a different font as well as different colors. The last thing you want to happen is see all your branding efforts go to waste because no one can remember
your company.

Mascot

It is actually amazing that many companies don’t have a mascot. You don’t always have to have a company mascot, but it is a great way to stand out from the crowd and become more memorable. One company that has done a decent job of branding their mascot is BOTW.

If you look at the image above, it shows the many fox mascots BOTW uses for their directory categories. The reason why I feel the foxes are effective is because they match each one to represent a category within their directory.

Consistency

Tons of companies purchase banner ads to brand their company. It can actually be very effective. The problem with how most companies advertise is that they are not consistent with their banner ad designs. You want to use the same logo colors and stay consistent or else the branding impact will not be as effective. Granted, if you change the look or the colors on certain ads it may increase your clicks throughs but it probably won’t help as much when it comes to branding.

Creativity

Being perceived as industry leader is not an easy thing. If you really want to blow up you are going to have to get creative. A few companies have came up with creative ways to brand themselves such as CI Host and Half.com.

CI Host got tons of branding when they paid someone to put a CI Host logo on the back of their head.

Half.com also became very well branded when they got a city to change their name to "Half.com".

These are just 4 things that you can do to increase your chances of having a successful brand. Some of these things maybe tangible for you and others may not because of your budget. Either way if you get creative you can still brand your company on any budget. Just think of what Dish Network did… having a town change their name to "Dish Network" in exchange for free satellite TV, Brilliant!

Do you know of any other cool and creative examples of successful branding strategies?

After an successful and uneventful cluster upgrade last night, we had unfortunately a major MySQL meltdown today. Our load balancer did its job well, and made sure sites with AuctionAds still loaded, albeit without ads. As of writing we are 100% back online. Obviously we hate to have downtime, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We’re working hard to handle the incredible growth our users have given us.

As always, thanks for using AuctionAds.