Thank you to Publishers for being patient while we worked to resolve the issues we had with this months payment.

For those affected, you would have received an e-mail from me explaining your personal situation and the steps we are taking to resolve it for you. If you have any issues please e-mail me back or speak to your Account Manager.

Next march the process should run smooth as per normal.

Again I apologise for any inconvenience caused by the delay.

I just wanted to get in touch with everyone regarding the February payments. Please accept my apology - we are running a little late due to a technical issue. We are working to resolve this ASAP and we should have the payments processed failry soon.

I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Until now the only way Advertiser’s could pay for their ad campaigns was through PayPal. The problem there is not everyone has access to PayPal due to their country of origin. There’s also cases where some people just simply stay away from PayPal - they just don’t like it!

Only recently we have introduced our very own credit card facility whereby you can pay for your ad campaigns directly through our service with no need to use Paypal.

This also allowed us to introduce the new auto re-booking feature whereby you can choose to have our system re-book ads for you when they expire!

This is just one of the many ways we have taken on board your feedback over the last 12 months and expect a lot more as well!

AdToll.com was initially founded and run by an Australian company so sending cheques in USD was costly. Publishers were charged $20 just to have a cheque sent out to them!

As of now we have abolished the $20 fee and cheques to publishers are now provided absolutely free of charge - that’s great news for publishers!

On another note, things are starting to get back on track here and one of our new Account Managers, Lyndsie, will be taking on board a lot of existing customer accounts, please make her feel welcome.

Thanks to everyone for being patient with us as we evolve and transition into our new management and support structure. The last couple of months have been a little rough on everyone.  We regret that but I assure you that things are now back on track.

Part of the management changes has been the appointment of the new President (man in charge). After much consideration I have gladly accepted the responsibility of the position and I look forward to continuing to enhance our offering to provide you with the most transparent and feature rich ad marketplace on the internet.

As President, my first priority is our customer service. As many of you know, we have always been known for our efficient, friendly and dedicated support and I don’t want this to change. We are now well into training our new support staff who will be taking over the Account Management roles some time next week.

We also have an excited and dynamic team working behind the scenes from our talented technical staff to our creative marketing personnel. You can be rest assured that your business is safe in our hands and that our mission is to ensure both our advertisers and publishers get the best bang for their buck!

Over the coming months we have plenty of changes in the pipeline so stay tuned and keep your eyes peeled to this blog for announcements and updates.

Thank you to everyone again for your patience but the wait is over…. I am now in charge and it is my sole responsibility to ensure the future success of AdToll, and I am dedicated to the cause!

It’s Dan here… yes you might remember me being the former owner of AdToll.com - that hasn’t changed.

I know a lot of you out there are wondering what’s been going on here. I have heard first hand from customers about lack of support, issues with ad bookings etc… There’s no good excuse I can give you so I won’t, but rather will say I am now working with the new team to help resolve outstanding issues and get them back on track.

It’s not all bad news however, late December a whole bunch of enhancements were made to the AdToll system, some of which you may not be aware about.

Payments by Credit Card

You are now able to make payments by credit card! We still accept PayPal but there are a lot of people out there who don’t use PayPal or their country doesn’t support it.

The addition of our new credit card payment has also allowed us to introduce auto re-bookings.

Auto Re-Booking Ads

When booking ads you are now given the option to automatically re-book when that ad expires. This is great for those advertisers who want to continue advertising without having to come back and book the ads again. Using this option will require the use of your credit card so that once our system re-books we can automatically deduct the payment.

This auto re-booking has also allowed us to introduce a new metric to site Rate Cards - the Re-Booking Rate. This metric shows you what percentage of advertisers re-book ads. This is very useful because it gives you an impression of what advertisers think and how their ads performed.

Run of Network Daily Budgets

In the past advertiser RON campaigns would run until the entire budget was exhausted. In some cases this was a matter of hours! One improvement which has been on the cards for awhile and requested by advertisers is the ability to set a daily budget.

This is great as it allows advertisers to budget their campaigns effectively.

Upgrade of SSL

We have upgraded the SSL on all domains to a Thawte SSL Web Certificate providing the ultimate in encryption. Very useful for publishers who run ads on secure pages.

Publishers  able to name Ad Groups

If you are a publisher you will love this change - especially if you have sites with lots of Ad Groups. Quite simply you can now give your Ad Groups a name allowing you to easily distinguish them in your account area and in reporting.

Ads can open in new window

Publishers now have the ability of having their ads open in a new window! To make this happen just edit the Ad Group and change the appropriate setting.

336×280 Banner Ad Format

We have added the 336×280 banner ad format.

Publisher controls length of Ad Bookings

In the past advertisers could book up to 12 weeks at a time on publisher Ad Groups. A lot of publishers didn’t like this as they only wanted short term bookings.

If you are one of those publishers then get excited as you now have the ability to change the length of time you allow advertiser’s to book ads. Simply edit the Ad Group and adjust the Max Weeks setting.

As you can see a fair few enhancements to AdToll have taken place in the last couple of months which should give you some hope!

Over the coming weeks a lot more will be happening but I can’t say too much at the moment. What I will say is thank you for continuing to use the service and sticking it out while this transition is underway!

It’s been a month since we acquired AdToll and it’s been a very busy time for all of us on the development team. We’re working on some exciting new features that we’re certain everyone will love.

To grow our capacity and support new features, larger publishers and more prolific advertisers, we’ll be moving the AdToll systems to a new, state of the art data center. This move will take place on Wednesday, November 19, 2008. And as a consequence of the move we’ll be changing the official timezone of the AdToll network to US Eastern Standard Time (GMT -05:00).

The current AdToll timezone is set as GMT +08:00. As a result of this change, sponsored ads running on the 19th will run an extra 13 hours. Advertisers will receive this extra time at no additional charge. Publishers running sponsored ads will be compensated for those 13 hours at the same rate the advertiser is paying.

You will likely see more impressions and clicks in your statistics on the 19th. Technically speaking, November 19th will last 37 hours in the AdToll network. This will cause a slight artificial inflation in your average daily impressions and clicks, especially if you’re new to our network.

If you’re an advertiser who has scheduled an ad to begin after the 19th and have timed that ad precisely relative to GMT, please contact your account manager. All ads scheduled to begin on the 20th and thereafter will still begin on that day, however that day, relative to GMT, will now begin 12 hours later.

As compensation, for publishers with sponsored ads running on the 19th, we will be crediting your payment history for 13 hours worth of commissions on those ads.

Finally, the official AdToll time will now observe the rules of Daylight Savings Time. Every year, on the first Sunday of November, when the clock moves back 1 hour, advertisers will essentially have 1 free hour of ad time. And on the second Sunday of March, when the clock moves forward 1 hour, advertisers will lose 1 hour of ad time.

Thank you for your patience during this transition. If you have any questions or concerns, contact your account manager.

Message from ADTOLL.COM LLC.

We are pleased to announce that we have acquired AdToll.com from Purplex Pty Ltd. Dan & Paul have done a great job building and nourishing AdToll and we intend to continue to provide you the same service and responsiveness. We are a US based corporation with many more resources and we plan to grow the product and provide additional services in time. We will tell you a bit more about us in the coming months. In the meantime, please review the revised Terms of Service.

Thanks, ADTOLL.COM LLC

Message from Dan Rucci, Co-Founder and former Managing Director

It has been 2 years since the concept was put together by myself and my brother Paul and since then we have lived and breathed AdToll. Coming from Australia, building a digital media platform and running a global business is not easy and to have recognition through acquisition from a US based company makes us very proud.

On behalf of my brother and I we would like to thank everyone who over the last 2 years has helped shape AdToll into becoming what we know is a successful, feature rich and and one of the most robust services available.

Change is good and this change will allow AdToll to continue along its path and provide the most outstanding customer service possible. If you are a customer you may have already noticed you now have a new Account Manager assigned to your account. Rest assure that AdToll’s dedication to customer service will not change and will only improve.

My journey isn’t completely at an end however; I will be working closely with the new team to bring about more exciting changes to the platform and ensure the values we instill in AdToll are carried forward.

I have been privileged and blessed to work with such a dedicated team and to have the support of family and friends over the last 2 years and for that I thank you all.

Regards, Dan Rucci

The new version of our PicText™ Ads are finally here! Initially we are releasing them as a BETA and are now calling on any Publishers interested in giving them a go.

To use the new version of our PicText™ Ads just create a new ad group for your site and select “PicText Ad Version 2 Beta” - then as normal follow the instructions!

What’s different about Pictext™ Version 2?

• The ads are automatically served in an IFRAME so our ads do not slow your web site loading time.
• You will be served far more relevant and a higher volume of ads then ever before.
• You will see a better payout rates and payout rates will vary with niche.

Technical things to consider

• There is no need to put the ad code into your own IFRAME as our new ads do this automatically for you.
• You can only alter the values in the ad code for the styles and other parameters. Do not alter the ad code in any other way - such as moving the styles to an external stylesheet.
• Testing has been conducted in a variety of browsers including IE6, IE7 and FireFox 2 and 3.

What should you do if you see a problem?

If you are using our new PicText™ Ads and you discover a problem or have some feedback please get in contact with us immediately. It’s through your help in this BETA stage that we will improve and iron out any issues.

We already have a number of Publishers who have been trialling the new version with some fantastic success! We look forward to working with all of our Publishers to help you monetize your web sites even better than before.

Keep in mind this is a BETA release and as such Sponsored Ad bookings will not be accepted, however you will be served a variety of relevant ads (based on your site restrictions, ad rating, vertical and user geo-target) .

** BIRTHDAY ADVERTISER BONUS AT END OF ARTICLE **

It’s incredible how quick time passes by. A year to the day we launched AdToll and in that time we have grown and matured to become the reliable, well-known and trustworthy service we are today.

In a market flooded with big players and literally hundreds of small players (who seem to disappear as quick as they pop up), we are proud to be here providing our service to thousands of customers on a daily basis. This one year milestone acts as a sign of credibility in a market riddled with scams and untrustworthy services.

On a personal note this last 2 years has been one of the most intense times of my life in terms of effort and stress. Such tasks as putting together our business plan, going through the design and build phases, pre-launch promotion/marketing, the launch and then in the last year working on bringing in new business, supporting our loyal customers at the same time as continuing to enhance and evolve our system to keep up with market demands (as well as our own).

Special Thanks

I’d like to take the time to mention 2 very special people that have been involved with AdToll literally from day dot and whom without we would not be where we are today.

My brother Paul who takes on the responsibility as our Business Development Manager who has done an outstanding job all round bringing in new business and also working on many other facets of the business including dealing with customers on a daily basis, product development and more.

Tara who has been on board since our launch was given the very demanding role as our Promotions Manager who has been responsible for a wide range of things but in particular external relations. Tara is the person responsible for getting us to ad:tech Sydney earlier this year where we promoted and networked with many players in the industry.

Of course there are people involved with the day to day running of the business and I’d like to thank them all as well.

What’s next?

So now that we are one year old what’s next? Well being the fast moving company we are, we are already working on the latest changes to our service of which we hope to have released later in the week. The changes include enhancements to our PicText ad format and help address some of the issues raised by customers in the questionnaire from a few months ago.

AdToll Performance

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out we have grown over the last 12 months. We currently have just under 1,800 active sites in the network in a range of verticals, with ‘Entertainment & Games’ and ‘Internet & Technology’ being our most popular.

These sites in total help us deliver over 1 billion ad views per month and by the end of the year we hope to double that throughput.

In terms of fill rate, each day we achieve approximately an 80+% fill rate across the board and again by the end of the year we want that figure to be around the 90% mark.

While fill rate is important so is ad relevancy and quantity. Over the next few months in particular we plan on working on increasing ad relevancy and quantity across the board. Keep in mind though that Publishers should be strict as to the ad industries they allow on their sites to keep the relevancy as accurate as possible.

A good indication of growth is the Alexa Rank and while some people don’t like is, I still think it is useful when used in the right way. Our current Alexa Traffic Rank Trend graph can be seen below.

As you can see our growth has clearly been in an upwards trend and currently our daily Alexa Rank fluctuates between 6k and 10k on a daily basis.

Our blog has been a very useful communication tool which we feel has worked well. Our RSS subscriber count grows on a daily basis which means our blog entries are hitting more and more people every day. Below is the graph of our Feedburner RSS count over time.

Well, while we could continue to reminisce on the last 12 month, we are more focused on the next 12 months and where we intend to take AdToll. In saying that I’ll close off by just again thanking everyone who has made AdToll a huge success over the last 12 months and we look forward to working with you all in the coming year.

BIRTHDAY ADVERTISER BONUS

To celebrate our first birthday we have a bonus we are offering! For every Tier 1 Run of Network campaign booked in the next 24 hours we will give you an extra 15% clicks absolutely FREE! For example by booking a $1,000 campaign you will receive an extra $150 of clicks absolutely FREE!