Just a quick note to all the adgridwork/reviewback users out there. We noticed the other day that some of our customer support emails were being picked up by our spam filter and skipping our inbox. We replied to the ones we saw, but we’re not sure how long this has been going on. If anyone has been waiting awhile for a response from us, there’s a possibility we never even saw your email, so feel free to resend any unanswered customer support messages. From now on we’ll make sure to keep an eye on our spam folder.

Today we are releasing new ad code that does not rely on iframes. This update has been a long time coming, but we believe we have finally nailed down all the bugs in the new code. We hope the new code will be much simpler and much easier to use. Obviously, we cannot force our users to upgrade ad code, so the old ad code WILL CONTINUE to work and be supported. We hope, however, that our users will agree the new code is an improvement. We still allow our users to customize the colors of their ad blocks via the JavaScript variables, though we have done away with the body_color variable. That was used to blend the background of the iframe with the background of the user’s page, and since we no longer use iframes, the body_color variable is unnecessary.

We have spent a long time checking and re-checking the code in many different browsers, but if anyone discovers any bugs or has any comments about the new code, please use our contact page to let us know. Also, I hope to have some more cool updates to roll in the very near future. Now that school’s out for the summer, I hope to be able to devote some real time and energy to adgridwork.

Kyle
www.adgridwork.com

First off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been actively sharing and participating in the adgridwork Advertising Network. We’ve been going strong for about 6 months now and already have almost 3,000 sites. It’s because of all our users that we continue to thrive and promote one anothers content and products.


Secondly, I wanted to tell you all about a brand new service that we have just launched: www.reviewback.com . Many of you may have heard of ReviewMe and PayPerPost, two services that allow you to pay to have another blogger link to and review your product or website. While, this is an excellent way of gaining exposure, paying for publicity is certainly not the adgridwork/reviewback way Thus, we have attempted to apply the adgridwork model to Blogging Reviews: You submit your blog to reviewback and can instantly begin browse the network and find other bloggers to trade reviews and links with. As always, the service is 100% free and is super easy and user-friendly.

Right now, we have very few blogs on the network and are looking to build a steady user base over the next couple of days. So if you are interested in increasing your brand and exposure via Blog Reviews, give www.reviewback.com a try and let us know what you think.

Kevin over at bloggingTips.com (the same guy who is running the ‘win a free mascot’ competition’) just published a blog post agreeing to feature any reviews of adgridwork on his page.

Kevin writes:

So if you combine that with the Link Back Promo that Kyle and I are offering, writing a few words on our service will net you two link backs/reviews from up and coming sites (adgridwork and bloggingtips, of course :). Be sure to check out Kevin’s blog and let him know what you think of our free advertising network.

Well, Kyle was doing a little websurfing this morning and stumbled upon an interesting article by Robin Good. The article profiles a large list of AdSense Alternatives and although Robin forgot to include adgridwork in the list, the most interesting aspect of the story reads:

Adsense lifts ban on Adsense alternatives

Where before it was impossible to run Adsense alternatives alongside Adsense advertising, there has been a recent change of heart on the part of Google. It is now possible to do so, as Jennifer Slegg of JenSense notes. Jennifer quotes Google executive Brian Axe, who writes that:

”When it comes to enforcing policies on third-party contextual ads, we’ll be following the updated program policies instead of the T&Cs on this point. That is to say, publishers may now display other contextual ads on the same site or page as Google ads as long as they don’t have the same look and feel as our ads”

Thus it turns out that adgridwork is compatible with AdSense by default since our ads are distinguishable from theirs in several ways (the fonts, borders, number of characters permitted, etc). So effective immediately, we will turn on contextual advertising for all sites on the network to ensure that more targeted traffic finds its way to all of our sites. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns regarding this issue. Thanks.

Nick & Kyle

As you can see, Kyle and I just rolled out a fresh redesign of our free advertising service. We felt that the old design was a little on the boring side plus I needed an excuse to try out some of the tips that I picked up in CSS Mastery. Not all the changes were cosmetic though. I overhauled the Campaign pages and allow you to your Ad Campaigns in a more intuitive fashion. You can now see complete summaries of how all your campaigns are performing in addition to the detailed metrics that we previously provided.

Also, we are now offering a link-back/review incentive program. Any sites that provide a static link to our page, or write up a review on our new redesign, tools or service, will have their site featured on the front page of our site (kinda like what digg just initiated with their refer-a-friend campaign). We’ll leave a link to your page up there for a week or so and hopefully provide you with some additional traffic. Also, we’ll add your site to the growing list of blog/site mentions over at our press page.

Finally, Kyle has been hard at work revamping our Ad Code as well as experimenting with some automated spidering software to help further target your ad campaigns. The new Ad Code should be rolled out in the next couple of days so for those of you who wish to upgrade. The upgrade won’t be mandatory, however, and we will still fully support the old Code as well. And the spidering software is still a work in progress and will hopefully be released in the near future.

So let us know what you think of the new site and enjoy .

Nick
1/2 of the Best Free Advertising Network on the Web

We had a few issues over the last couple of days with our site registration page; people were being told their domains did not match when in fact they did. We believe these issues should be taken care of, so we hope that everyone should be able to register sites smoothly again. As always though, email us with any problems you experience.
We’re been spending most of our time lately trying to promote the adgridwork and get more sites to join the network. We’ve also got some new features in the pipeline that should improve the site; we hope to get some features done soon. Feel free to send us your suggestions for the site as well.

To kick off the new year, we have developed a new look. Over the weekend we released version two of adgridwork. In addition to a whole new look for the site (feedback is always appreciated), we also have a whole new ranking system. Instead of a number, we now provide two ranking percentiles. The first is your percentile relative to your general category (i.e. if your site is under Blogging: Technology, Blogging is your general category, and your rank is relative to all sites under Blogging). The second percentile is across all sites in the network. The new rank has more factors involved; your rank is now dependent on conversions/impressions (or ctr), clicks/requests, total clicks/second, and total requests/second. All these factors are weighted relative to the average values across all sites (general and adult sites are weighted only against the general and adult networks, respectively). We’re always looking for ways to improve the service, and hopefully this new ranking is a step in the right direction. Any feedback is always appreciated; we hope everyone likes the new look and has been having a great new year.

Nick and Kyle

We’d like to start this post out by wishing all of our members a happy holidays! We hope everyone has a safe, fun and enjoyable time celebrating over these next couple of days. So as of this moment, the Spread The Cheer - Holiday Competition has closed and we have tallied up our three winners. We are going to wait until New Years to announce the winners (don’t you love the anticipation?) and we will send out the check and update the rankings that day. We want to thank everyone who participated in the contest: you helped not only yourselves, but everyone else in the network as each new site brings more traffic and visitors to all our sites. So once again, have a great holiday and check back on the first to see who the lucky winners are!

Nick and Kyle

So we’ve been busy the last couple of weeks working on some minor bug fixes, enhancements, new pages, new Ad Code functionality, and our first contest (which is more than halfway over for those not paying attention to the dates). Heres a quick summary of some of the changes that were released in the past couple of hours:

• Custom Color Tool: So we realized that not everyone that uses our site is fluent in HTML and some people were having a difficult time customizing our Ads to match the color scheme of their page. So we decided to roll out a simple color selection tool that will allow you to easily choose the colors that you would like for your ad. You will be able to specify colors for
  the Title, Description Text, Link, Background, Border and the Body (area outside and between your ads). You can update your current campaigns and select colors or when you create a new site the color selection tool will be available. For those of you who like to edit your HTML by hand, this is totally cool as well, and you don’t have to worry about using this tool or changing your existing ads.
• Individual Site Exclusion: We were receiving quite a few emails from users who noticed that certain Ads were appearing on their page that didn’t quite sit well with them. So rather than forcing you to go to adgridwork.com, log into your account, edit your site, and add a domain to the exclusion list, we have bundled this entire process directly into your Ad Code. So now when you see an Ad that you don’t like, simply Right-Click on the Ad, enter your adgridwork Password into the password field, and hit Go! This will automatically add the Advertisement into your exclusion list and you won’t ever see it on your page again!
• New Pages: We added a few new pages to the site over the past week including our Press page and the Top Sites page. While these pages aren’t particularly exciting, the Press page gives you a glimpse of what some of the Blogs and Websites out there are saying about adgridwork and the Top Sites page showcases (in real-time) the Top Sites on our network. We figured its good to gloat about our own site and the top Sites once in a while, right?
• Spread the Cheer - Holiday Competition: For those of you who haven’t logged in in some time, you may have missed the launch of our Holiday Competition. Basically, we are giving all of our users a chance at earning 50 dollars and a top ranking for the whole month of January (your Ad will be served 20% of the time)! All of the information is available on the Competition page including rules and all the prizes. There are still a few days left until we tally the results so get out there and start recruiting!

Well that pretty much sums it up for now. Like always, we are always looking for your feedback and suggestions so Get at Us with your thoughts. And finally, we’d like to thank everyone out there who have helped build the World’s First Free and Targeted Advertising Network. It’s amazing to see all of the sites on the network working together to promote one another. Simply amazing!