Intermittent weirdness
February 19th, 2008 by Philip KaplanFor some of you, your Spottt stats are showing that you got few few (or zero) impressions. If this applies to you, know three things:
- You are actually getting impressions, however they are not registering in your stats currently. For example, you might even see something like “You got 0 impressions and 5 clicks.” Now you can stop scratching your head.
- You are not being charged credits for aforementioned impressions - they are free
- We’re not going to sleep until it’s fixed, so hopefully it will be fixed tonight. :)
We launched 7 days ago and thought we would be prepared for all the traffic, but alas we weren’t. We grew faster than expected (yays!) but experienced some scaling problems (oh noes!).
We’re working on a solution, which includes increasing software and database efficiency, as well as beefing up our hosting infrastructure over at Amazon EC2.
Thanks for bearing with us. In the meanwhile, those of you affected should be amassing lots of credits. Which is nice.
Update (9:08 PM PST) - We’re still working on it. Currently we’re showing “house” ads (those cute pink Spottt ads) 50% of the time, to lessen the load. Don’t worry, you’re still accumulating credits, which will be spent once we get through this. Getting close…
Update (10:15 PM PST) - The fix has been launched! We still need to keep an eye on it for a few hours/days. But, 15 minutes later, things look good. I’ll update tomorrow.
February 20th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Philip
Thanks for staying on top of this and getting it fixed.
However, one thing is strange. Last night, I had 600-800 credits. After the fix @ 10:15pm PST, all ads displayed all night. Now @ 8:45am EST, I have received 377 impressions, 0 clicks.
While receiveing Zero clicks is not improbable, I don’t think that anyone (except bots & webmasters checking their sites) saw my ads, thus, no clicks.
I bring this up because I think many other members will also observe the same thing. Overnight, our ad credits were all used up, but no one was really there to view them.
To be a useful advertising tool, I think that the impressions credits should used during the day time when people browsing the net will see them, not overnight when everyone is sleeping. If this trend continues every day, I think that many members will eventually give up (which would be bad).
I know you folks are working very hard to provide a “Free” service and we all appreciate and applaud your efforts.
I hope you take these comments as constructive criticism, not merely as a complaint.
Keep up the good work
And Thanks for working for us!!!
John
February 20th, 2008 at 11:09 am
FOR SOME REASON I CANNOT GET MY SPOTTT JPEG IMAGE ACCEPTED.
I AM OPEN FOR SUGGESTIONS. THX IPOD-MAGICS.COM
February 20th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
@John
I can see that your site is geared to Americans and doesn’t have much value for overseas users. Targeted timing of your ads would work great. However, it would not be fair to other advertisers and publishers if Spottt were to ignore the fact that there are Spottt users awake and online while you and I are sleeping.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Hmm…my account is still pending…
February 20th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Ahh..so that’s why I got a zero impression a few days earlier but 3 clicks heh heh
February 21st, 2008 at 2:23 am
[…] little more intermittent weirdness popped up today. Working on it. In the meanwhile, you may see lots of ads for Spottt showing up […]
February 21st, 2008 at 11:58 pm
[…] network is growing fast these days and they had some system and scaling issues. Hope they can solve all […]
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:30 am
Just a reply to the users that are seeing image upload issues;
If your image is VERY large you may not get to post the image. Try to make it a nice size. This is a small 125 image after all.
Many great tools exist the resize images. I like http://picnik.com/ they have an online tool that is great and creates quality SPOTTT images. The PicNik tool is free!