In order to be able to offer several new products and features on Ad Chap, we are changing from a clicks based balance to a money based balance.

Advertisers
Your existing click balance will be converted to money at the price you paid for the clicks.  Going forward, instead of buying clicks, you will just ‘add funds’ and the funds will be added directly to a cash balance (instead of clicks).

Publishers
Shouldn’t notice any changes.  All revenues earned will continue to be added to your account history on a daily basis as usual.  You will continue to be able to see real time intra-day stats from within the Ad Chap interface.

One of the new features that is coming is geographic ad targeting.  This will allow advertisers to better focus their campaigns and also will allow us to better monetize all of the traffic for our publishers.  We are currently building and testing geo-targeting and will have more news about the release date and its benefits for you soon.

The change from click balance to a cash balance will take place before the end of this week.

We would like to clarify with advertisers what type of advertising is specifically not permitted on the Ad Chap network.  We have recently started working with facebook and participating in talks that strive to define and maintain standards for ads on the facebook and Ad Chap platforms.  The goal is to maintain and improve the user experience on facebook applications and on facebook in general.

The types of ads that are expressly not permitted on Ad Chap are as follows (as taken from the facebook Platform Application Guidelines):

1. Adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual;

2. Obscene, defamatory, libelous, slanderous and/or unlawful content;

3. Content that infringes upon the rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity or other personal or proprietary right, or that is deceptive or fraudulent;

4. Sale of liquor, beer, wine, tobacco products, ammunition and/or firearms;

5. Gambling, including without limitation, any online casino, sports books, bingo or poker;

6. Inflammatory religious content;

7. Politically religious agendas and/or any known associations with hate, criminal and/or terrorist activities;

8. Political content that exploits political agendas or uses “hot button” political issues for commercial use regardless of whether the Developer has a political agenda;

9. Hate speech, whether directed at an individual or a group, and whether based upon the race, sex, creed, national origin, religious affiliation, marital status, sexual orientation or language of such individual or group;

10. Illegal activity and/or illegal contests, pyramid schemes or chain letters;

11. Content from uncertified pharmacies;

12. Sale or use of web cams or surveillance equipment for non-legitimate use; or

13. “Spam” or other advertising or marketing content that violates applicable laws, regulations or industry standards.

If you see ads on the Ad Chap network that disregards these guidelines, we would like to know about them.  Please send us a screenshot of the ad and / or a copy of the ad text (send to support@adchap.com)  We will assess them and if they are in fact infringing on the guidelines, we will remove them from the network.

These guidelines are applicable across the entire Ad Chap network whether on facebook, bebo, myspace or any other social network.

Thanks for your attention to this, keeping standards on ad content will help to ensure a positive user experience for everybody.

Some advertisers and publishers have been asking what the user demographics of the Ad Chap network looks like. To give you an idea we have compiled the stats for January 2008 as an example. As expected, USA, UK and Canada were top of the list with a total of 54% of the traffic. If we add in Singapore (6%), Australia (6%) and New Zealand (1%) then we get 67% of the traffic coming from primarily English speaking “1st World” countries. One could also argue that Norway, Finland and Sweden could be added to that list as those countries all pretty much can speak English as a second language. That would bring the total up to 70% for the “1st world” plus English speaking audience.

We were actually surprised by the lack of presence by Spanish speaking countries to date. Facebook has just launched the Spanish language version though so maybe Spanish speakers will take to using facebook more with a localized interface.

We are currently working on and testing geographic targeting for Ad Chap. Soon, advertisers will be able to target their campaigns to certain countries and groups of countries.

As we add more social networks to Ad Chap, it will be interesting to see how the user demographics change. With geographic targeting you will be able to target your demographic across the whole Ad Chap network and all of the social networks that we work with. We will keep you posted on progress.

Today we are announcing that Ad Chap is open for business on Bebo. We have ported our Ad Chap interface for advertisers and publishers to the Bebo application platform and is available for use immediately. To our knowledge, Ad Chap is the first ad network to offer the convenience of working directly in Bebo.

Bebo has approximately 40+ million users with approximately 11.6 million of those are in the UK and Ireland and it is the largest social networking site in the UK by far. Bebo is also said to be the world’s most engaging social media network with users spending an average of 40 minutes per usage day on the site (source: bebo). The latest research from Nielsen Online suggests that the average age of a bebo user is 29.4 years old. So much for the myth that only teens are using social networking sites (they claim the average age of a facebook user is 34, in case anyone is wondering).

Our move to Bebo will give Ad Chap advertisers much more reach to European and International social networking site users going forward. Advertiser’s off-facebook ads (ads for external or outside of facebook properties) placed on Ad Chap will be automatically distributed to both facebook and bebo so you don’t need to make any changes in your campaign.

The only difference for advertisers is if you are advertising for a facebook or bebo application. If this is the case, the we assume since these applications only work on their respective platforms that these ads should only be shown on their respective network. So if you advertise for a facebook application, your ad will only show on facebook. Same for bebo.

For publishers, we have created several new ad formats to suit the different page size in bebo. As usual, you are able to customize the look, feel and colors of your ads to suit your application. Publisher payout terms, percentages and earnings remain the same as on facebook.

Both advertisers and publishers will continue to have real-time stats and reporting on their campaigns and activity.

We are dedicated to expanding the reach of Ad Chap across social networks. The next big one will be MySpace. MySpace has launched their developer platform in beta and it is expected to go live in 2-4 weeks. Ad Chap will be there to serve your advertising and publishing needs.

Ad Chap on Bebo is available at http://apps.bebo.com/adchap/