We have been listening to social networking application publishers needs and one of the things they have been asking for is a better way to manage their traffic for all their social applications, across all social networks and across all Ad Networks.

We have built just that.

Features
Serve Ad from Multiple Ad Networks
Manage your traffic and ad serving for all of your ad networks from one interface.  We now allow you to enter the ad code of the other ad networks you are using.

Application and Ad Space Level
To start off, many will want to manage the traffic on an application and ad space level.  Lets take app ABC on facebook.  This means that you can choose any ad space on app ABC and split the traffic.  Lets say it is a 250×250 square ad on the home page of app ABC and you want to split all traffic between three ad networks.  33% Ad Chap, 33% Network A, 33% Network B.  No problem with the new Ad Chap Traffic Manager.

Country Level Traffic Management
We offer traffic and ad serving management down to the country level.  Want to give 23% / 30% / 20% / 27% of USA traffic to four different ad networks, and the rest of countries split 25 / 25/ 25/ 25?  No problem.  You can also set each country’s traffic separately down to this level of detail if you like.

Dynamic Changes
Once it is set up for your ad space(s) on your app, you can change the percentage of traffic sent to each ad network, add an ad network, replace an ad network and make other changes to your heart’s content.  No more changing the ad codes on your apps a hundred times.

Statistics
We can only track your costs and revenue on our own Ad Chap network so we have kept your Ad Chap statistics and all other 3rd party statistics separate.  Your Ad Chap served ads will still give you the same real time statistics you have already been getting.  For 3rd party served ads, we give you textual and graphical statistics on impressions only.  We also have impressions by country in textual and graphical map formats.

Tracking Clicks and Revenue from 3rd Party Ad Networks.
We only serve the ad of a 3rd party network to your app page, after that we can not track clicks nor revenue.  That will be done in the admin interface of the other network that the other ad is coming from.

Setup
We have tried to make the setup process as easy as possible.  Just follow the notes and tips on each page and you should have no problems.  The Traffic Manager is available under the “Manage” tab of the publisher interface.

The Cost?
There is no cost.  We do require that you send a minimum of 15% of the traffic to the Ad Chap network.  This helps us to cover the costs of serving ads for other networks as we don’t earn any proceeds from this new service.  We feel it is a reasonable minimum percentage.  If you have a very large app or large amount of traffic and need to lower this, let us know and we will try to work something out for you.

Social Networks Served
We currently accept publishers with quality traffic on the following social networks:
- bebo
- facebook
- friendster
- hi5
- hyves
- myspace
- orkut (launching in Sept 2009)
- netlog

The Ad Chap Traffic Manager service is available immediately in the Ad Chap publisher interface.

If you have any questions please contact us at support at adchap.com.

Last week we have added the ability for application developers on the netlog social network to deliver ads with Ad Chap to monetize their applications.

Ad Chap is now available on the following social networks:

facebook
bebo
friendster
hi5
myspace
netlog

For those of you that are not familiar with netlog, we will be posting an overview of of this popular European social network in the coming week.

This week we have introduced a new ad design and format for publishers.  It is a standard size IAB 728 x 90 banner size that looks like this:

- Advertisers can include a picture (left) and a custom call to action of their choosing.
- Publishers can customize the look, feel and colors to suit their application pages.  You can configure this in the Ad Chap web interface as usual.

The new ad design and the call to action feature for advertisers is available for use immediately.

If you like the design and would like to see other IAB sizes in this format, let us know.

Everybody was buzzing last month about Bebo, the social network that experienced unprecedented growth in March, achieving a monumental 49% increase in unique traffic to their website.

Although networks like Facebook grew more into terms of total users over the same period, Bebo took the prize for the fastest rate of growth; at 49% growth month to month, Bebo was far ahead of the pack.
Since AOL’s acquisition earlier this year of the Bebo network, traffic to the UK-based social network had increased dramatically, due in part to AOL’s decision to begin porting their profiles over to Bebo in March and integrating their online and IM clients with the social network. While the move to acquire a pre-existing social network isn’t unique among the old portal giants (Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us and MyBlogLog), the immediate explosion in the growth of monthly unique visitors to Bebo’s network was.

When the April numbers came in, however, it became apparent that the massive spike was in growth rate was, largely, a one-time thing. However, the modest drop in the growth rate (-5%) indicates that Bebo is doing a good job of keeping traffic at their current levels – which is still significantly higher than it was before. Although the rate of growth may have slowed, the amount of traffic seems to be remaining steady – meaning that opportunities on the Bebo network are significantly better for both advertisers and publishers than they were before the March spike.
The integration of Bebo and AOL began in March, as did the bump in traffic. As more and more AOL users begin to populate their Bebo profiles and network with the pre-existing body of Bebo users, this bump in traffic can be expected to sustain for some time.

2008 was an amazing year for social networking; overall, the number of unique visitors to social networks grew by hundreds of millions, bringing with them unique, fresh opportunities (and challenges) for advertisers and application developers.

(Note: All statistics shown cover the United States only.)

From a first glance at the graph, a few things become quickly obvious:

Facebook is on the way up in a big way. Skyrocketing from around 41 million unique visitors in September 2009 to almost 74 million in February of 2009, Facebook has definitely pulled out to the head of the pack. During that five month period the social network’s averge monthly growth during was around 6.5 million unique visitors, or somewhere around 215,000 unique visitors a day.

Myspace, on the other hand, seems to be currently experiencing a decline in monthly unique visits. This may be due to Myspace’s dramatic concentration of younger users aging and the network’s failure to attract new youngsters at the rate that old ones are going inactive (the topic of a forthcoming AdChap blog post). In roughly December, 2008, Myspace was outmatched by Facebook, and the spunky social network seems to have started a slow downward turn since then, despite its syndication of popular television shows like Prison Break and 24.

Ad Chap services for advertisers and publishers is available on both Myspace and Facebook. In February, 2009, those two networks together experienced over 125 million monthly unique visitors in the USA.

Smaller social networks are having mixed results. On the one hand, in little over a year, Twitter has grown from less than a million to around seven million unique visitors per month, and that’s only recording traffic to the Twitter.com website; users connecting through the API constitute the majority of the micro-blogging platform’s daily user base.

Reunion.com started catching up to rival Classmates.com, the latter of which experienced little overall growth in 2008 (16%). Upstart Flixster, whose Facebook application has consistently ranked among the top ten Facebook applications, experienced a peak in traffic around July of 2008 and has maintained more or less steady traffic since then, despite allegations by some users of “spammy” invitation features.

LinkedIn, perhaps the most refined and professional of social networks, has also enjoyed upward slopes in its unique visitors throughout 2008 and sits solidly at #5.

On the lower end of the spectrum, Club Penguin’s niche audience warbled slightly but remained roughly steady throughout the year.

AOL, like longtime Fantastic Four villain Dr. Doom and ailing Cuban ex-dictator Fidel Castro, stubbornly refuses to die; monthly unique visitors to its AOL Community site declined to just 483,000 in February 2009, a 25% decrease from a year before. That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft’s Windows Live Home network, which enjoyed a 25% increase in traffic to its social networking site from the same time last year.

Looking into the future, it is safe to assume that Facebook’s momentum will continue to carry them upward throughout 2009, although we can’t assume that they will continue to experience such rapid growth as particular demographics begin to become “saturated” with users. On the other hand, the social networking behemoth is constantly seeking new demographics to tap into.
The same can be said for Myspace’s apparent decline; the social network will almost certainly take proactive steps to bring back inactive users in 2009; the effectiveness of their music, tv and other attempts remains to be seen.

One thing we can safely say, though, is that in spite of the rise and fall of specific social networks, the overall trend is dramatically upward-reaching. Barring a global apocalypse, social networking is going to continue to grow well into the next decade, as will monetization opportunities for developers and continued reach to drive sales for advertisers.

Interested in tapping into the wellspring of social networking traffic? Or are you a social networking application developer? Ad Chap has a solution for you.  We are currently available on Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster.