Considering that GAM was a free solution, they have created DFP for Small Business as the equivalent of GAM.

Unfortunately, if you’re serving over 100 million impressions per month, you will need to upgrade to DART.

The estimated cost for serving ads via DART would be about 1000 EUR for 100 million ad impressions.

Oh well, just wanted to make this small update.

PS: A lot of things happened in my life since my last post, I hope I get the time to talk about them.

Valuation Metrics Oct09 –

LTM and NTM have the meaning of Last Twelve Month and Next Twelve Months

EBITDA is the well known acronym for Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization

So how much is your business worth ???

I’ve been seeing these guys : http://www.iq-test.ro placing their ads on Google, on AdBrite and on almost every fill all/bad quality ad network and exchange I know.

How does the scam work ? Pretty easy. You fill a meaningless iq test and then you are asked to send an SMS ( extra charges apply, of course) to receive your IQ Test.

Due to the sheer volume of this campaign, it’s pretty likely that they’re making some good money from the poor(stupid) people that fall for it.

Now that you know about the scam you can either:
a. Bulit a similar “business” yourself or
b. Do something to shut them down .

Good luck !

Am primit de curand noul meu card Visa Platinum. Pentru cei care nu stiu de Visa Platinum, in Romania e oferit de Banca Transilvania. E un produs premium, zic ei, pentru top managementul companiilor, oameni de afaceri renumiti ( sau pentru antreprenori online de success, zic eu!), accesibil daca ai un venit minim de 3500 EUR pe luna.

Oferta BT nu a fost pe placul meu, in special pentru ca e un produs denominat in RON, iar eu doream USD. In plus, cu toata oferta, au comisioane destul de ridicate. In schimb, am primit o oferta exact pe placul meu de la banca straina cu care lucrez, integrata intr-un pachet de servicii mult mai mare.

De ce Visa Platinum ( sau orice alt card premium) ?

Cel mai important:

• Desi in Romania nimeni nu se uita la ce tip de card ai, in alte locuri lucrurile stau altfel. La fel cum interlocutorii tai se uita cu ce esti imbracat, ei se vor uita si cu ce vei achita nota de plata. Un card Platinum e o forma de carte de vizita.
• Oportunitati de networking. Ai access in lounge-urile de business din aeroporturi. E o oportunitate grozava de a umple timpul mort din aeroport realizand ceva productiv. Cine stie ce magnati/afaceristi straini o sa intalnesc si desigur o sa le recomand sa investeasca in Romania.

Mai putin importante;

• Asigurare de viata . Nu planuiesc sa o folosesc “anytime soon” ( chiar planuiesc sa prind anul 2100 ! ) , dar nu strica niciodata sa stiu ca familia mea va primi ceva “just in case”. Cuplat, asigurare pentru bagaje pierdute in timpul calatoriilor. This is really handy.
• Serviciu de Concierge in aproape orice tara din lume. Serviciul Concierge te ajuta cu rezervari, bilete, informatii sau alte nevoi si probleme ce apar in timpul calatoriei intr-o anumita tara straina.

And here is a picture of it :

I met up with Val early around Unirii Square at my place and then bravely took on the terrible morning traffic+snow. We arrived early for some reason, only to discover the lovely Cristina Bleoju ( Ivanka.ro and Seedmoney) waiting outside for the Cafe Zu people to arrive.

The event can be described as “constructive fun”. We listened to instructive speaker presentations, watched a demo of the XTWIP product and heard a couple of pitches each followed by lively Q&A sessions. All this happened while enjoying coffee and cakes just like friends do.

The attendees of the event are enthusiastic, successful and positive. A crowd that I like. I enjoyed meeting and talking to Cristina Bleoju, Victor Anastasiu, Daniel Tiganila, Bogdan Bocse and his colleague Andreica, Sorin Matei, Costin Oane, the twins. I hope to catch up with all the other interesting people I didn’t talk to.

Seedmoney manages to create a unique “feel-at-home” atmosphere and I have to admit this is something I’ve been missing professionally. Belonging to a group is very important for the mind & soul and I will surely attend again.

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Also today, after the SeedMoney breakfast, I’ve received my first Christmas present from the great people at the Transilvania Bank. Thanks to Carmen (branch director), Gabriela  and Alex(my direct contacts) and Ema(my first great account manager) my life has been so much easier. I owe to you guys an important part of my achievements and I’m really proud to know you.

I mention a nominal increase because if house prices/401k’s go up 20%, the average American will feel better, but the currency will most likely devalue 25%(more than 20% anyway), thus leaving everyone worse off than before. Inflation is due when you print Trillions worth of currency.

The cumulative deficit of the USA stands at over 9 Trillion( !!!!!) USD for the next decade. Compare this by adjusting to scale with Romania’s deficit of 60 Billion EUR, and you could only say that America is in a deeper mess than we are.

At this time, the current debt to GDP ratio for the United States stands little below 100% ( via TheDebtClock ), but within a decade, with the 9 Trillion estimated, will reach 150% around 2019. Anything above 200% ( the current debt to GDP of the Japanese) is uncharted territory, a place where no modern country has gone before.

Their only option at reducing this deficit seems to be the introduction of a consumption tax, similar to the European VAT. This is the first article in NYTimes about VAT( link here) , but I have read other commentaries from members of government as they are first “testing the waters”.

Some excerpts :

- Members of Congress, like their constituents, are squeamish about such ideas, instead suggesting spending cuts or higher taxes on the rich. But with a lack of political will to do the former, and a practical ceiling to how much revenue can be milked from the latter, economists across the political spectrum say a consumption tax may be inevitable.

- Like universal health care, every other industrialized country in the world already has a value-added tax (as do about 100 emerging countries). ( I see this as a tactic of getting people used to the idea first, I could bet good money that in a maximum of 6-8 years, we will have VAT in the States ).

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Given the obvious/hit you in the head risk of inflation mid-to-long term, I will try to exit part of my current USD holdings. I am waiting for a dip/scare in the market that will shortly drive the USD under the 1.4 boundary against the EUR.

At the time when I’m writing this article, we have 2 resistance points at 1.45 and 1.40. Time will tell.

I’m posting this speech here for myself also. I have a habit of re-reading the speech from time to time.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

I’ve been using DMX to serve about 1/5-1/4 of all advertising space on my network for some time now( a little over a year ). It was mainly used for remnant inventory, everything that does not get sold directly or to our first tier advertisers.

For those of you who don’t know about these exchanges, they offer the value added benefit of optimizing “on-the-fly” which advertiser will serve the ad at any time T.  It uses a bidding algorithm, simply the highest bidder from the group delivers the ad. A very nice and efficient idea, clearly this is a heading for the future of display advertising. We all need and want to squeeze that extra cent out of our business.

I am afraid that some of the ad companies that have based their business on DMX will face some serious trouble. I plan on ending my relations with most of these companies sometime this month.

Totally unrelated, while writing this mini-article, one of my servers crashed briefly. It was one of the big ones: 8 cores, 16 GB RAM, 1000mbps uplink, velociraptor HDDs. A jewel. Within one minute, my e-mail started buzzing, one of my colleagues was all over on GTalk, my telephone started receiving SMSes. Talk about being connected.

I’m going to document a simple implementation for one advertiser with several banners that will display on one ad zone, with some geo-targeting restrictions.

Step1: First you need to define an “Ad Slot”. An “Ad Slot” will be a placeholder for one banner/creative from your advertisers.

I recommend to name your ad slots using their properties : (WebsiteName)_(position)_(size). This is a subset of my ad slots:

I will be using the _Center_468x60 ad slot for the example. You simply go to “New Ad Slot” and insert your parameters in the form displayed.

Step 2: You must then create a “Placement”. A “Placement” designates an area on your website. Commonly, you will only have one “Ad Slot” for each “Placement”. If you have several banners grouped together in one area of your layout, you could add them in one single placement. This offers some nice opportunities like banner rotation for that group.

I also name Placements according to their position and size ( actually, I wasn’t that thorough below) :

For the example, “_Center_layout”  is used as a placement for the “_Center_468x60″ ad slot. When I created the placement, I added this ad slot as inventory.

Step 3: We need some ads to link to our “ad slot”. We will change tabs to “Orders” and create a new order. Click “New Order”. I’ve created “Azoogle_MyFunCards” for the example:

Step 4: Creating line items. Each order contains one or more line items. Each line item contains (usually ) one or more ad creatives(banners).

You will place more ad creatives in one placement when you want the ad creatives to be rotated. This is an optimization method designed to help determine which banners are better, which have a higher CTR. ( I use “banner” and “ad creative” interchangeably, they nominate the same thing ).

MyFunCards is a spam/scam-like PPI(pay per install) program operated by the same company that owns webfetti and the smileys. Please don’t advertise this shit ( and you will excuse the language), as you can see it’s targeted at youngsters. I only use it as an example.

MyFunCards pays different rates for Intl, UK and US traffic. There are 3 different creatives, one for each country group. You will want to optimize delivery by placing some geo-targeting restrictions. For example : “display “Intl” banner  if user NOT from US, UK”.

One option is to create 3 “line items”, each line item will contain one “Creative” with the respective ad code. For each “line item”, I will choose geo-targeting restrictions and connect it with our “Center_layout” placement for delivery. Don’t forget to connect “line items” with “placements”, this is the most important step.

You will also have to choose a “Delivery priority”. These are the options:

- Exclusive: Highest-ranking line item type for fixed-position and time-based campaigns. ( exclusive delivery also has options for undefined end date and unlimited cap )
- Premium and standard: For impression-based campaigns.
- Remnant and network remnant: For unsold inventory. Network remnants can have an unlimited daily cap and undefined end date.
- House: For unsold inventory.

This is how your “line items” should look:

Step 5: Create an “ad creative” for each “line item”.

That’s about it. You should test the code to ensure proper delivery. You can get your HTML code from “Inventory” > “Get sample HTML” ( pretty straightforward all the way ).

Some end notes on advantages and disadvantages:

- OpenX was unreliable. GAM is still somewhat in beta and has it’s moments ( I had an entire order disappear for about 10 minutes, it then magically showed up).

- Big advantages for GAM : no extra work/overhead for maintenance/upgrades; cost-reduction of about $100/month as the OpenX implementation was hosted on it’s own server.

- One disadvantage for GAM is that it normally serves ads only via “script” tags. This means that if one of your advertisers has some problems with their ad server, when browsers parse your code, your page will freeze until the broken ad will timeout. To overcome this issue, I have always used “iframe” tags. GAM doesn’t have “iframe” tags by default. I did manage to solve the issue: they do have iframe tagging available upon request and … I got approved and I’m currently using this beta-beta feature.

- With GAM, you have to wait about 10-15 minutes until your ads show up. I will surely want to test if my setup is correct, so I have to keep myself busy for 15 minutes with this in mind. It’s a bit annoying. With OpenX it was enough to clear it’s delivery-cache and you had a live look at what was going on.

- GAM has a very nice debugging tool. It’s enabled by appending a “?google_debug” query string to the pages that display the ad code. It offers some very nice reporting. The BIG downside is that not all the features of “google_debug” are available for the “iframe tagging” implementation.

- GAM doesn’t offer the option of grouping placements by “website”. Since I’m operating over 20 websites, this means I have a long list which I have to weed through. The placement naming scheme I use comes in handy (website name first), as the listing is alphabetical. OpenX didn’t raise this problem.

I guess that’s it. I jope it helps.

Thanks to Cristi Manafu, which I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet, but seems quite a capable individual, this event is going to take place for the first time in Romania. This is the first Launch48 event to take place outside the UK.

The event is due quite soon, between the 7th and 9th of December.

It will take place in association with NetCamp. From what I have digged up, Netcamp is an event that helps attendees with information about starting their own business. The list of speakers is strong, so the information presented will be of great value for any newcomers in the field of ro-online.

This combined event seems like a great opportunity for anyone and everyone who “does”/goes online. Be it that you are a newbie/aspiring young business man or be it that you are a veteran of the online field, you should attend or participate.

For the veterans, chances are you’ll benefit from great networking ( I’ll be there ! ) and for the apprentices, this is a great chance to prove your worth and to test your abilities.

I will try to participate as a viewer, so we might have a chance to meet.

More details:

Netcamp presentation

Launch48 official site

PS: Finally a post about online business.