Shiny Ads is pleased to announce that Sonico.com, South America’s 2nd largest social network, has launched a self-service advertising offering for small advertisers and their members using the Shiny Ads self-service advertising platform.

“Sonico.com was looking for a robust self-service advertising solution that could handle our multi-lingual users that were not savvy advertisers.” said Tomás O’Farrell, Chief Marketing Officer of Sonico.com, “Shiny Ads had the built-in support for the pricing model, display banner sizes, direct tie into DART DFP and most importantly, support for Spanish, Portuguese and English speakers”.

Shiny Ads automates the entire ad purchase process for smaller advertisers on mid-to-large web publishers bringing the long-tail advertiser’s lost revenue within reach.

About Shiny Ads

ShinyAds, the innovator in self-service advertising platforms, helps the medium-large web publisher generate more revenue without additional costs by enabling the selling of display and text ads to smaller advertisers directly on a publisher’s web sites.  Launched in January 2010, Shiny Ads’ customers include  top-1000 sites with local news and special interest/niche topics.  Find your lost revenue by visiting http://www.shinyads.com.

With the popularity of iPhone apps and now iPad apps, mobile advertising has become a very exciting growth market. To monetize that mobile traffic, apps are today relying on mobile ad networks such as Google’s adMob, mobclix and soon Apple’s iAds.

While eCPMs on the iPhone have been better than traditional online eCPMs, they never get near direct-sales ad rates (card-rates) since app owners are running their ads through ad networks.  That is where Shiny Ads’ self-service advertising platform can help.

While most of our publishers operate large online web sites, our platform can also handle mobile advertising in apps and to showcase how you can accomplish this, I’ll give you an example of one of our publishers who also has an iphone app;

Dogbook released an iPhone app that has similar functionality to their famous Facebook app.  They chose to monetize it with a 320×48 ad unit at the bottom of their application.  This ad unit is being served by the same OpenX ad server that serves their online ads.  This has the benefit of allowing Dogbook to change their ads in real-time and not have to release app updates whenever they change ad networks or paid campaigns.  They are planning on an iPad version too and the only change that they will need to do, is to create a new ad unit with a size of 640×50.

Since this ad unit is being served up by a traditional ad server, they created a new ad zone in Shiny Ads that allows smaller advertisers to purchase the iPhone ad unit.  These ad campaigns get served up instead of the ad network ads and monetize at a much higher revenue level.  When a user clicks on the ad, a new Safari full-page window opens up with the destination URL.

If you don’t run your own ad server, you can still use Shiny Ads’ ad serving code in place of your traditional ad network code.  Just point your mobile ad unit to our ad serving code and place your ad network’s ad serving code as the default ad in our publisher interface.  That will ensure that when you receive an advertising order, it will be displayed instead of the ad network’s remnant banners.

Shiny ads is pleased to announce that Newschoolers.com, part of GrindNetworks.com, has starting selling online advertising directly to smaller advertisers using the Shiny Ads self-service advertising platform.

“Newschoolers.com has long been a place that is the breeding ground of whats next in the sport of skiing. Many tiny brands built themselves into legitimate companies through advertising on Newschoolers.com. However, as things grew and clients got bigger and bigger, it was hard to service the smaller companies who really just needed to get their first break.” said Doug Bishop, Newschoolers.com’s General Manager, “Shiny Ads allowed the Newschoolers team to service clients all the way down to the tiniest hat brand, and ensure that they too could have the opportunity to grow into staples of the ski industry”

Shiny Ads automates the entire ad purchase process for smaller advertisers, including directly interfacing with Newschoolers.com’s ad server DoubleClick DART DFP. Smaller advertisers can purchase online display advertising on Newschoolers at http://newschoolers.com/web/content/pagetemplate/name/advertise/

Having smaller advertisers purchase online ads in a self-service interface isn’t new. Google AdWords launched in 2000 and has become the de-facto standard when small advertisers think of online advertising.

But this is actually a problem. Smaller advertisers don’t think to look anywhere else to advertise other than Google and when the adventurous do contact a web site’s direct sales force, they get an unpleasant surprise with the large minimum buys, unknown industry terminology and a process that isn’t catered for an ad-industry outsider.

This explains both the excitement that self-serve advertising technology has with web publishers for its revenue generating potential, but also the myth that by just making it available, “they will come” and purchase ads.

As with any early technology, promotion is key to educate your customers and to break through the myth barriers.

Last week, we had one of our largest clients create a promotion with their existing Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform. They increased the clicks that their advertisers could purchase, but kept the price the same. At the same time, they promoted their “Advertising Sale” aggressively throughout their web site, including the home page, with eye-catching banners and buttons. They also upgraded their ‘Advertise Here’ page with more instructions on the process to get their advertisers more comfortable with the concept.

The promotion was a huge success, increasing their revenues, and more importantly, adding new 1st-time advertisers, who will return.

Because small advertisers don’t necessarily know that they can directly purchase advertising on your web site and they normally don’t visit your ‘Advertise Here’ page, you need to promote and educate to supercharge your direct self-serve advertising revenue.

By making small advertisers aware, educating them on the benefits and the process, and by giving them pricing options that work with their budget, your self-serve advertising revenue will become a major part of your overall online advertising revenue (along with your direct-sales and ad network revenue).

When I arrived in Toronto from California’s Silicon Valley, the high-tech capital of the world, I was concerned that Toronto wouldn’t have the network of tech companies and people that I had been accustomed to.

But over the last several months I have personally seen a side of Toronto that most living outside of it never see. Toronto is full of smart and friendly tech “connectors”; people who selflessly share insight and personal connections to help out others. You would expect that from your advisory board, and they definitely have produced, but it is inspiring to see it from friends, colleagues, and most times, just first-time connections.

Thank you from everyone involved with Shiny Ads for connecting us with investors, prospective customers, and brain-storming with us on new ideas and opportunities: Ari A, Casey R, Chris S, David C, Jay H, Jay G, Jeremy W, Jonas B, Jonathan T, Jose L, Mike B, Rob K, Richard R, Trevor H.

On another note, we are hard at work on several major new features that will greatly expand the reach of Shiny Ads for our web publishers customers. November and December will be very busy months, which in the start-up world, is a good problem to have.

We are happy to have deviantART.com launch their Shiny Ads implementation after a couple of weeks of testing. deviantART.com is using Shiny Ads to allow their artists to advertise their artwork on the site in a 300×250 sidebar ad unit.  Their pricing model is CPC and their pricing options range from $20 to $1,000.

They are also using a new beta feature of Shiny Ads that allows them to “skin” the advertising interface to look like the rest of their web site.

You can see it at deviantart.com

Dogbook (& Catbook), a very popular Facebook application, is now accepting advertising orders right inside their Facebook application using Shiny Ads’ advertising widget.

They embedded the advertising interface right into the Facebook application and thus it looks like it is part of their own interface.  They are using a product list of packaged impressions.

You can see it in action here.