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AdGridWork is a targeted ad newcomer, defying Google's inflating AdSense keyword prices by offering their service for free. It's a systemized and easily integrated link-sharing program of sorts, and aims to offer an alternative to the standards for text ads. We first covered AdGridWork here, and I recently had the opportunity to catch up with creator Nick Mazza.
Could you tell me about your new development group? How did your team come up with the idea of your new website b a a a p?
Sure. b a a a p programming and design studios is a new web design company that my partner, Kyle Johnson, and I decided to form after receiving numerous requests from different parties to help them with design projects. Since launching our first and primary endeavor, many people have noticed our web presence and sought help from us.
Rather than just field through emails and handle these projects on the side, we decided to launch a
complete design studio to handle the increase in work requests. Thus baaap.com has become our portfolio as well as our contact point for web design work. You can see all of the projects and websites that Kyle and I have completed in the past as well as get a hint of the services that we offer. As for "baaap,"
The name comes from a saying that our group of friends used to say in college and just kinda stuck.
Does b a a a p correlate in any way with your existing company AdGridWork?
As mentioned on baaap.com, adgridwork is our flagship product. It's what put Nick, Kyle and baaap on the map. Essentially, its what prompted us to launch our design studio and field requests for work.
How is AdGridWork going?
adgridwork is going great! As of writing, we have around 1,000 sites on the network and are growing daily. I took some metrics a week ago and found that we had served around 25,000,000 Ad impressions and are penetrating specific portions of the blogosphere. What's great about our service is that with each new site that registers with us, every other site on the network sees an increase in traffic. I'm working on a brand new layout for the site and Kyle is completely revamping our ranking algorithm. We also have some big things planned including the addition of graphic ads and site targeting for high ranked sites (these sites well be given 'credits' that they will be able to apply towards guaranteed display on sites of their choice). All in all, the community has responded fabulously and has helped create a solid network of sites.
What are some important lessons you've learned since launching AdGridWork?
a) Digg is a fantastic marketing tool. We were featured on Digg the first day that our site launched and received an incredible surge of high quality traffic. I'd recommend that any startup report their launch on Digg as it can be the first big swell of registrations for your site.
b) Your product is NEVER finished. Kyle and I launched adgridwork thinking that we had covered everything a user could want in an ad service and that all the bugs were worked out. Need less to say, one month later and we still have many user requests in the queue and are getting new ones daily.
c) Simple is good. adgridwork.com is a really simple site with a simple goal: help users promote their site for free. We have tried to address that one problem without branching out to cover as much area as we could. I see too many new startups piling feature upon feature into their product until its almost unusable. What's great about adgridwork is that it takes 5 minutes to set up and install into your site and once your done, you really never have to worry about it again. Its a true 'Set it and Forget it' product.
What's it like heading up so many projects? Do you have time to sleep?
It's actually a lot of fun juggling a lot of projects. And in addition to the web stuff, you can add a college education, an offline job, and a relationship. Phew! But I've found that the more stuff I have on my plate, the more efficiently I work on each of them. And you can ask Kyle, I always manage to get my 8.
When do you plan on launching your official site for adgridwork?
This is a tough one. The thing is, every time we feel like we are ready to launch and have the site just how we want it, one of us comes up with a new idea or feature and we begin hacking away at it, I have a feeling, though, that once I launch the redesign and Kyle finishes with the backend overhaul, the world will be ready for adgridwork.
What new features do you hope to add to adgridwork? to b a a a p?
Aside from the couple that I mention in Question 3, here are a few features off the top of my head, for adgridwork:
a) Improved metrics: Right now our metrics are a little confusing to people who have never used an advertising service. Plus, we group all our metrics on one page rather than splitting them by Publisher and Advertiser (something we plan to do with the redesign).
b) A Site Crawler: We currently rely on the users to provide the category and keywords in which to target their site. While this is adequate for now, once we grow we hope to have an automated process by which to assist users in targeting their content. Kyle has proposed a Site Crawler that will crawl sites on the network and store specific keywords and content so that users won't have to. They will simply submit their site and adgridwork will take all the guesswork out of the targeting.
c) Contests: Everyone loves contests! Our Spread the Cheer: Holiday Competition was a great success and many of our members participated. We hope to have similar contests like this in the future as it makes building the network fun and rewarding. for baaap:
a) Online Quote Estimator: The only real thing missing from baaap is a way for a potential client to figure out how much a project is going to cost. We plan on adding a system that will take a users description of a project and return the estimate cost.
What's it mean for Adgridwork to be AdSense friendly?
Adsense's Program Policy says that you cannot display Adsense Ads on the same page as other contextually targeted ads. So for users who have Adsense (boooo) on their site, we give you the option of turning off the Targeting if you want to use our service. Thus, by not serving content targeted ads via adgridwork, you will be within the restraints of the Adsense Program Policy.
