Kenneth Ballenegger

Report on iAd

I’ve been running iAd on relatively high traffic since day one. Here’s how – for me – it’s been performing, and how it breaks down against competing ad networks.

First, the good. The eCPM is amazing. Some dude reports getting $150 eCPM on his first day on iAd. While this is mind-blowingly high and in no way representative of the average on the network, eCPMs can be expected to be quite high. My eCPM averages $10-$15, which is quite good.

Of course, we have to put these numbers in perspective. We cannot do a 1-to-1 comparaison with competing networks. Another important factor to consider: Most competing ad networks refresh their ads every 30s. iAd does it every 3min. Thus, for the time it takes iAd to display one ad, another network gets to show 6.

For a fair comparaison, we need to adjust the eCPM. Taking the above into account, let’s divide the number by 6 to get something we can compare to networks that refresh every 30s. The resulting figure isn’t really an “effective cost per thousand impressions,” but rather something more like an “effective cost per 500min of ads being displayed.”

Compared thusly, the eCPM on iAd is only worth about $1.60-$2.50. While still quite high, this is nowhere near the mind-blowing figures that have been thrown around.

Last thing to consider: fill rates. They’re are appallingly low. Though this seems to be slowly improving, they remain below 10%. Compare this with most other non-premium networks which often get you 100% fill rate. A solution would be to run iAd as a first option, and fall back to another network for failed requests. Also, I would suggest keeping the ADBannerView around even when not displayed, leaving it to refresh in the background and once it does return an ad, displaying it.

I’m sure the fill rates will improve over time, and that iAd wil become a worthy competitor over time. Right now though, the reality is iAd generates less revenue than my previous first option, Google AdSense for mobile.

Update: Greg Yardley rightly calls me out on mistakenly stating Apple’s figures included their 40% cut. Article updated accordingly.

iLaugh 2.9 is out!

iLaugh 2.9, in its Lite edition, is now out in the App Store, bringing to you a number of new features, fixes and enhancements.

Here’s what’s new:

• iOS 4.0 compatibility
• Multitasking and fast app switching support: When you come back to iLaugh, you’ll be taken right back to the joke you were reading before you left
• Now loads a lot faster due to additional caching
• Less promotional messages
• Better ads, leveraging Apple’s iAd network (to be launched July 1st)
• Various UI improvements
• Important bug fixes

Check for updates in iTunes – or if you haven’t yet, check out iLaugh!

Donate to Save The Gulf

Tumblr Staff:

Thank you to everyone who donated to Save Our Gulf this week! I’m afraid we can’t match any more contributions, but if you’d still like to donate and unlock the Limited Edition Black Dashboard preference, we’re leaving a donation page up through the weekend.

Thank you!

I just donated. If you can spare $5, I hope you do, too.

The Power of the Cloud

a.k.a. What It Feels Like Having Two Months Of Your Digital Life Wiped, And Then Subsequently Restored Thanks To Cloud Computing

I’m usually pretty diligent about backing up regularly. I’ve even got a terabyte drive and a Time Capsule both setup to backup automatically. But these last few months have been quite eventful. I’ve finished up my first year of college at the California College of the Arts, moved into a new apartment, and took up a job at Tapulous. With all this commotion, I never managed to take the time to setup my Time Capsule.

As luck would have it, my hard drive dies on me last Friday, literally the same day I get the Time Capsule out of its box and end up putting off setting it up to the weekend. At the moment, I paniced a little, thinking of how catastrophic a two-month data loss would be. All my photos, my music, my work, my whole digital life… gone!

So, though a little depressed, I decided to take the opportunity to perform a much-needed clean install. As I was setting up my most frequently used software, and putting back in all my accounts, I realized that I had not lost as much as I feared. The first sign was in re-installing 1Password, the app which contained all my password and important banking credentials. Luckily, I had set its database to be stored in my free Dropbox* folder, which syncs automatically to the cloud. Getting that restored was as easy as typing my Dropbox credentials in.

Through MobileMe, all my emails, calendars, address book, keychain and settings were preserved. I managed to recover my lost photos and music from my iPhone using Ecamm’s great PhoneView app. My work was under source control, and was regularly pushed back onto my servers (git is amazing, really!). My Things library synced back from my iPhone onto my Mac. Various other services (including Google’s) kept track of other aspects of my digital life. It’s amazing how much data was able to survive this otherwise catastrophic crash. What couldn’t be recovered was restored to its month-ago state. This include most of my schoolwork, and business data. Thankfully, I hand’t done any schoolwork in the last month, and the data loss on that front was pretty minor overall.

In order to make sure this never happens again, though, I have committed to keeping all of my data in the cloud. I signed up for a Dropbox Pro account, to which I moved my iPhoto Library, Things Library and any folder where I store documents. As a bonus, I get all that data now synced up between any Mac I own, and my iPhone and iPad.

I am now fully convinced that Cloud Computing is the biggest step technology has taken since the invention of the computer.

* Full Disclosure: referral link, gets me an extra 500MB of storage, and gives you an extra 250MB if you sign up using that link.