Jan 29

Advertising in Yoono

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In the coming weeks Yoono users will, in addition to new features, begin to see advertising within the Yoono product.  It’s always a challenge for companies to strike the right balance between making money and providing a great user experience and it won’t be easy for us either.  That said, we wanted to use this blog post to do a couple things, namely:

 

  1. Give our users a heads up that ads are coming
  2. Communicate our goals for advertising within Yoono
  3. Make sure there is an open channel between you, our loyal users, and Yoono on the topic of advertising and monetization more generally

 

Since 1. has already been accomplished in the preceding sentences, let’s talk about 2.  Why are we putting ads in the product now and what do we want to accomplish?  The most obvious answer is of course to make money so we can continue providing great products.  During 2009 we’ll be experimenting with several different ways to generate revenue and advertising will just be one of those ways.  With advertising in particular, we would like to:

     

  • Provide relevant ads that are contextual to your browsing behavior.  This would be done by matching ads to keywords on the page you are viewing.
  • 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.

 

These things sound relatively simple but in practice they are not easy.  In particular it’s likely that early on our ads may not be contextual and thus their relevance may be hit and miss.  Rest assured we’ll be working to improve relevance over time as it’s in the best interest of both our users and Yoono.  If you have questions or suggestions, as always, we’d love to hear them – shoot us an email at support@yoono.com anytime.

 

Thanks again for using Yoono!

 

The Yoono Team

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  • Great blog. Do you know of any relevant marketing forums or discussion groups?
  • Dlrpfan
    Can we have the contest results?
  • todd
    Thanks everyone for the feedback, we really do appreciate it. We definitely understand the key points of your feedback re: aggressively flashing ads and advertisers that have sites that aren't particularly user friendly. At the end of the day, we are users of the product just like you - we get it.

    We are looking to add additional ad networks very soon to broaden our inventory. We'll also take a look at the individual ads displayed based on user feedback. Finally, we'll be adding "advertisement" text to make it clear that these are ads and not messages from Yoono.

    At the end of the day however our goal is to be able to continue to provide the Yoono service and that may mean some ads that are not optimal for some users but help us generate revenue. It also means that on some smaller monitors the ads will take up a significant amount of the real estate as several of you have pointed out. As mentioned, we will explore several ways to monetize the service in 2009 and we are definitely considering a paid version that is ad-free so please let us know if that is something you would be interested in.

    Please continue to help us with your feedback on this topic and any other!

    Todd Pringle
    VP, Product Marketing
  • Gwyn
    Ads: A necessary evil.
    Static ads: tolerable.
    Animated ads: worse.
    Misrepresentation: the worst.

    Please screen your ads and REJECT the ones that try to get you to click under false pretenses: "2 friends are looking for you" and the like.
  • Pfunk
    I think your development team should have fixed some of the core issues before implementing ads. Like getting your Forum Moderators to actually answer some problems. At least Create some better Stickys. I would have never upgraded if I would have known the only fix was for Ad space. It does shrink the available space and the flashing animated ads are taking away from your sidebars clean look. Plus if you use an ad blocker they will just be white space anyway.

    Ads = a dumpy looking product. Might as well remove Invite friends to use Yoono.

    Thanks,
    Pfunk
  • Leslie
    It makes Yoono useless on my ASUS Eee PC. It takes up too much room and I can't see more than one email and one tweet.
    Too bad, it was a great tool while it lasted.
  • The insertion of advertisements has been very disappointing. I can't use it on my netbook anymore as the advertisement now takes up over half of the screen space I was using to read updates. When I first started using the product I told everyone I knew about how good it was. Now I have to tell them about this troubling change. I'm going to look for another product and will be sure to recommend it to my friends as a replacement.
  • I can understand the need for ad revenue but please no animated ads. There is currently a glittery text ad running. Not only is it annoying and far from unobtrusive, its flashing text triggered a severe headache. Please be aware that people with seizures or other neurological deficits like my MS are adversely effected by these.
    I was LOVING yoono before the update and I would have gladly paid a small monthly fee to use it ad free. I teach blogging classes and I was going to introduce it to my classes next week as a time management tool to handle their social networks. I don't feel that I can recommend it until there is better ad management.
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