Introducing...AdProject.net
February 27, 2002

Spring is in the air, and you know what that means: It's time to start a new company.

Actually, I've been working on it for months, but it seems to have finally reached launch quality.

What is this new company, you ask?  Good question.  Let me tell you.

The new company is called AdProject.net, and it's a self-serve ad system for small to medium sized web site.  It's a joint effort between myself, Chris Book (the technical genious behind LyricFind), and a third party who shall, for now, remain nameless.   Here's how it works:

1. A web site (say, LyricFind.com) signs up (for free) to use our system
2. They put up our ad code
3. They direct buyers to the Order Page, where advertisers customize their ad
4. Both Publisher and Advertiser track the ad's performance through our Member's Area

In other words, it's pretty straightforward.  We handle all of the ad serving, reporting, and billing.  Ads are paid for by credit card using our merchant account and transaction processing system.  Once a month, we send cheques to the Publishers for the amount of ads they've sold (less our 25% commission).

What are the benefits to the Publisher?

• Complete automation of ad sales
• Much smaller commission (versus the 50%+ other networks charge)
• Ability to capture the small time advertiser (most networks have a $10,000+ minimum buy.  Since our system is all automated (read: almost no overhead), our minimum buy is $5)
• Enterprise-level ad serving
• Support for both Banner and Text Ads
• Rich Media defaults - if we don't have a paying ad to serve, we pass the ad view along to the Publisher's existing network - so they have nothing to lose!

What are the benefits to the Advertiser?

• Small minimum buy ($5)
• Ability to experiment with various ads cheaply (because of the low minimum)
• Extremely targeted ads

Why do I believe this venture will be successful?

First of all, I believe that current advertising networks are missing a big chunk of the ad sales action by forcing huge minimum buys onto their potential advertisers.  There's tons of small companies out there who would love to do some online advertising, but either can't justify or don't have $10,000+ (US) to spend.  With LyricFind, we were one of them - we looked at a lot of possible advertising opportunities, but they were all way too expensive for us (I remember Launch trying to sell us a sponsorship for $250,000!!  Yeah right!).  If we could've spent $100 or $500 on some quality, targeted advertising, we would have - but instead that money stayed in the bank.

Secondly, there's no better salesperson than the site owner(s) themselves.  With a higher profit margin from sales through AdProject, site owners will be more eager to push ad sales.  Not only that, since they're doing it themselves, there's no risk of a network sales rep upselling the advertiser to a different site.

Thirdly, the business has extremely low overhead.  The largest investment was building the system; now that that's done, our only expense is the hosting fee and the cost of writing cheques once a month.  This low overhead provides for a very low critical mass necessary to break even.

Finally, there's literally no reason for publishers to not sign up.  If they sell zero ads, it costs them zero dollars to be part of the network.  And since we've built in the ability to use Rich Media/JavaScript defaults (something no other network has), unsold inventory gets passed along to their other network just as if they weren't using us at all.

It's truly a system I believe in, and one that truly has the potential to reshape the world of online advertising.

It's going to be an interesting summer.

Get more information on AdProject at the AdProject.net Web Page.