Today we will begin launching updates to our apps that include advertisements. This is a test that we’ll be running over the next month or so to determine the effectiveness of a new form of advertising and advertising partner Ad.ly. As some of our loyal users may recall, we ran ads in the product for some time in 2009 – here was our blog post on the topic then. Our goals remain largely the same today with this new test, specifically:
- Provide relevant ads – ads that are relevant are the best kind of ads we’d all agree.
- Be as unintrusive as possible – we don’t want to get in the way of a great user experience.
- Be flexible – adjust our approach based on what’s working and what isn’t as well as direct user feedback.
With our 2009 advertising program, we simply didn’t deliver on these goals and so we removed ads from the product. In particular the majority of the ads were not relevant and low quality – we were unable to find ad networks that could deliver us quality inventory. Ad.ly specializes in contextual in-stream advertisements for apps like ours and so we are optimistic and excited that they will be a much better fit and be able to deliver high quality, relevant ads to our users. That said, Ad.ly is a start up themselves so we expect that the variety and quality of the ads will increase as the test period goes on – thanks for your patience during this process.
For the test, you will see the ads, clearly indicated by a different background color and “Advertisement” text, at the top of some of the streams in the product. They scroll away when you scroll down your list and in the near term will only appear at the top of the stream. Ultimately they are designed to be contextual to your social stream and in the interests implicitly expressed within it – for example by who you follow. You may also see ads that are local to your geography if all works well. Note that we do not share any personally identifiable information with Ad.ly in order to deliver these ads.
Obviously, we want your feedback! We use software and the web too so we of course understand ads are not going to be everyone’s (read: anyone’s) favorite feature of Yoono but we do genuinely hope to find the right balance between effectiveness, relevance, and user experience. To that end, let us touch on a bit of the bigger picture thinking around ads.
We have been incredibly lucky to have what can be called “patient capital” in the company. In other words our investors have given us significant leeway to build a great product first, find a user base, and focus less on monetizing our service in the near term. For that, we have been very appreciative and have worked extremely hard to successfully create a great product and growing user base. In the interim, the near term has turned into the medium term and it’s important at this stage for Yoono to prove to our investors that our service is valuable. That said, it’s not only that we need to provide a proof point for our investors, it is also because we are eager to grow Yoono as a business and have the ability to add employees with the singular goal of providing the best social apps on the planet and doing so at an increasingly fast pace. Unfortunately that can’t be done without cash money. Billz. Dinero. You get the idea.
We are strong believers in making our product available “for free” to users and in order to do so we believe supporting the free product via quality relevant ads holds the most promise for the company and for users. We may try other avenues, but we’re going to try this one first. It is absolutely our intention to provide paid ad-free versions of the products as well for those who would rather pay a small fee to enjoy the product without advertising. It’s our belief that this “freemium” business model is where the social stream application market will be heading in the next 12-18 months – both on desktop and mobile. What this means is that if the test is successful on the dimensions outlined above, we will continue with the in app ads and continue to optimize them. We will also at that time work to make the paid ad-free versions of our products available.
As we’ve stated before, Yoono as a company genuinely values each and every one of our users. Your enthusiasm is incredible and keeps us pumped up as we bang away on our keyboards night and day. We also value the thoughtful and copious amount of feedback you provide us each and every day. We expect it will be no different with our ads test so please let us know what you think in the comments or email us directly at feedback at yoono dot com.
And if you could click on some ads, that would be great too. Thanks!
Todd Pringle, VP Product Marketing
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