“Shiny Ads is excited to partner with DigitalTown to empower their self-serve advertising. Local advertisers will now be able to advertise exactly where their audience is online and get the exposure that they are looking for without having to spend large amounts on online advertising,” said Roy Pereira, President of Shiny Ads.

“With this ad platform we will have a virtual billboard online at every highway, tying to every local high school zip code,” said Richard Pomije, CEO of DigitalTown.

Phase one of the launch will begin with simple monthly ads. Phase two and three will be released with multi-domain and national platforms built in, which will be rolled out through 2011.

DigitalTown will announce its pricing and ad inventory levels in its February roll-out.

Users can follow their favorite team by searching for their school under www.digitaltown.com.

About DigitalTown:

DigitalTown, Inc. in Burnsville, MN is developing a nationwide network of more than 27,000 local online communities for high school students, alumni, boosters and local citizens. For more information, please visit www.digitaltown.com.

About Shiny Ads

Shiny Ads, 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 www.shinyads.com.

Safe Harbor Language:

Any statements contained herein related to future events are forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act 1995. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. DigitalTown, Inc. undertakes no obligation to update any such statements to reflect actual events. For more information, please visit www.digitaltown.com.

Company Contact:
DigitalTown, Inc.
info@digitaltown.com
(952)890-2362 (office)

Source: DigitalTown, Inc.

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).

We are happy to announce that a major feature upgrade has been launched in the last few days.

1) Doubleclick DART DFP ad server support; Along with OpenX, Shiny Ads now directly supports DART DFP for campaign and banner insertion and monitoring. Support for DART includes many of the pricing models previously available including CPM, CPC, CPD (except exclusive). In the next few months, we will be working on adding support for two other major ad server platforms. Also, we now support OpenX Enterprise Hosted.

2) Promotional Codes; Send a discount code to your best advertiser or to a disgruntled advertiser. In the “promotional codes” section, you can create one-time promotional codes with either a percentage discount or a fixed amount. While you can generate any number of codes, regular fees are associated with the final discounted amount.

3) Banner Templates; Banner Templates are a great way for you to have all of your advertiser’s banner look the same or give them an even easier method to build their banners. There are several built-in banner templates but you can also create your own.

4) System Uptime monitoring; In an effort to make our performance more transparent, the Dashboard section now displays Shiny Ads’ up-time in the last 30 days (currently at 99.87%).

5) Page Monitoring; Along with Google Analytics, we now support your own ComScore, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Quantcast, and Audience Sciences analytics monitoring codes on the Advertise pages.

6) Internal ad server statistics; If you are running of of our internal ad server, the Dashboard section will now list impression/click statistics per advertiser for the specified period.

Also, we are hiring a experienced sales person to lead our web publisher acquisition efforts. This person will be part of the executive team and be a key person in our funding process. If you of anyone, please send them our way.

And finally, one “small” change; we are finally out of BETA status. Thanks to all of those who gave us feedback and worked with us to handle defects. Although we are out of beta, please keep your feedback coming to support@shinyads.com.

Today, we made available 3 key pieces of feedback so that our publisher can make the appropriate changes to their pricing and media kits and increase their conversation rates:

• Was there enough information in the media kit?
• Was the price reasonable?
• Was the pricing options easy to understand?

For example, we now support multiple pricing models. Different web publishers charge different rates for their ads. Some charge on a CPM (impressions), some on the number of days, and some on CPC (clicks) basis. Sometimes ads are exclusive: no other advertisement can be sold for days already purchased. We have also added support for a CPM bidding system that is similar to Google AdWords and gives a higher priority to ad purchases that come in at a higher CPM rate.