Spottt Bloggg

Today I was checking out a great Spottt site, Fjetsam, and found this most excellent Rick Roll video, embedded below. Original blog post here.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Rick Roll phenomenon, click here.

Here are some of the bigger sites using Spottt. Each of these sites generates 10,000 to 100,000+ pageviews per day! Kinda cool that by using Spottt, you get free advertising on these sites and thousands more.

All links below open in a new window, if you wanna check em out:

• 3GP music search engine
• DrewpyDraws images for MySpace comments
• SwapTree game/book/cd/dvd exchange
• Software.com free software downloads
• CyArena free graphics

Rock on!

We’re putting together a to-do list for Spottt and want to hear from you. What features should we add?

To get started, here are a few nice features that have been requested already:

1. Make a directory of all the Spottt sites, so everyone can see who’s participating
2. Give you the ability to control what kinds of ads appear on your site
3. Increase everyone’s traffic by encouraging people to visit other members’ sites. For example, you get free credits when you click someone else’s Spottt ad to visit their site. That way you can “Spottt hop” around the network, check out new sites, and simultaneously help your own site (by getting free credits)
4. Allow multiple versions of your Spottt ad
5. Change the pink to some other color ;)
6. ???

Any more ideas?

Neat article in Fortune about Spottt.  The thing I like about it is that they got Microsoft to comment… I was curious to hear their view.  Check it the Fortune article, “Turning Microsoft’s ad trash into treasure.”

For more on LinkExchange/Spottt history, see my blog posting, “Free ad exchanges throughout history.”

Today the 2,000th member joined Spottt (thank you, Home-Gardening-Tips.com!)

To celebrate and thank everyone for joining, we’ve just deposited 2,000 free credits into everyone’s account. Thanks for being part of the first 2,000!

Stay tuned as we develop new ways for everyone to earn bonus credits and get more clicks; especially small sites who need a little extra juice.

Update:  If you missed the deadline and didn’t get your free credits, fear not!  We have more opportunities for free credits coming up.

We manually review every site that uses Spottt. After a site is approved, we constantly monitor it and re-review it. Among the things we look for:

• Spottt graphic is “above the fold” — at most 850 pixels from the top of the website, so people don’t have to scroll down to find it
• Site contains no adult or “inappropriate” content. Your Spottt graphic doesn’t contain scantily-clad babes and so on
• Spottt graphic isn’t overly distracting, such as a wildly annoying animation. Spottt supports GIF animations, but within reason…
• Spottt graphic isn’t misleading, such as “you are the 1 millionth reader, click here to claim your prize!” and other stuff like that.
• Site is in English. Foreign language support is on the to-do list.
• Site is relatively high quality. We reject sites that look like they’re still under construction or not yet ready for prime time.
• Site loads quickly — we reject sites that load too slowly or not at all
• More…

We reject a lot of Spottts every day. The reason we do this is because we want to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake. If you have a great site with your Spottt code up near the top of your page, you’d feel cheated if the guy who’s ad is showing on your site broke the rules, and has his Spottt way down on the bottom of his page.

In other words, we do our best to insure that a pageview on every single Spottt site is roughly equal. If you find that your Spottt was rejected, just follow the rules above and you should have no problem getting approved.

Thanks for making Spottt fun and rewarding for everyone!

Hope everyone had a fun weekend!

You may notice a little slowness as the Spottt on your site loads this morning, due to all the signups over the weekend. But rest assured that we’re working on it, and it won’t slow down your site.

More updates as I have em.

Update (11:20 a.m. PST) - Things are looking great, Spottts are loading instantly from where I’m sitting.  Will continue to monitor.

Spottt makes it easy to see when people visit your site, from other sites. We also make it easy to see when people click the Spottt on your site, to visit a different site.

And of course you’d rather people visit your site. So make sure your Spottt graphic is compelling and makes people want to click. Hopefully your “clicks in” is larger than your “clicks out.” But keep in mind that it’s not necessarily such a bad thing when people click on a link to leave your site. Here’s some food for thought:

Amazon.com shows ads for competitors on their product pages. Look at a product on Amazon (example) and find where it says “Sponsored Links,” usually about half-way down the page.

Amazon doesn’t show these ads because of the few cents they earn when someone clicks them. Rather, Amazon’s mission is simply to help customers find what they’re looking for. And if they find it by clicking an ad, so be it. The idea being that if you please your customer — even if that means sending them elsewhere — they will return.

We can’t all be Amazon. But perhaps there’s something we can learn from them.

Okay… everything seems to be working well right now.  Performance is 100% and Spottts are being shown correctly.  Thanks for your patience!

Let us know if you notice any problems or have any suggestions.