Wayne Lin was one of the publishers we video interviewed during our San Francisco California Roadshow for Direct Media Exchange. He overcame some unique challenges while first trying to monetize his site a number of years ago; he also reaped unique successes by choosing to address a little recognized (but huge) market niche: Chinese and Chinese speakers living outside of China.

This month’s featured publisher is Wayne Lin and his site is Wenxuecity.com (also known as ChinaGate.com).

Vince Panero: Can you tell us about your website/s? How would you describe your focus/business model? And are there any particular issues exclusive to your site that you had to overcome to make the advertising model work?

Wayne Lin: Established in 1997, Wenxuecity.com is one of the largest overseas Chinese community portals in the world. We cover the issues and hot topics that are most important to our readers. We cover the significant trends that affect the lives of those who make-up overseas Chinese communities around the world.

Like all other websites, we went through those dotcom crash years without any ad income, but we had also built up our readership very substantially during those years.

VP: Did you get into this with the idea that you would make ad dollars from this site? How did you initially monetize your site? What problems did you encounter utilizing these early methods?

Wayne Lin: Yes, our website is purely a content website, and we had an ad revenue model in place from day one. In the first few years, we had a very tough time getting major ad network approval due to our website being a non-English one. Later we proved that our demographics are mainly Chinese living in USA and Canada; 100% of our readership are Chinese living outside of China. Today we are serving an average 500 million ad impressions per month.

VP: Why did you start using Direct Media Exchange as your ad management platform of choice?

Wayne Lin: We experienced most of the major ad networks over the years and could not find smoothness in an ad management platform until Direct Media Exchange came in the picture. This gave us the opportunity to run and manage multi-networks on one platform; it’s much more easy to use compared with all the other networks that we’ve used before.

VP: What statistical changes have you seen since you started using it? For example, have your eCPM and revenue increased?

Wayne Lin: Yes, we averaged a 20-30% increase in revenue from the first month that we switched to Direct Media Exchange. It allows us to easily switch around multi-networks with back-up placements. We also have the ability to set-up our own eCPM minimum price to let all networks compete for our inventory. With these features, our bottom line definitely improved substantially.

VP: What do you like most about Direct Media Exchange? Are there helpful parts of it that other ad management interfaces simply don’t offer? And how does it address the specific needs of your website’s unique niche?

Wayne Lin: I like Media Guard the most because it allows us to set our own preferences to filter out certain type of ads. Also, the various reports from Direct Media Exchange really help us to adjust our ad delivery and pricing very efficiently.

I especially would like to mention the geographic reporting; it helps us analyze our readership and how it reacts to ads in different geographic areas. This is definitely useful for our website since we have readers coming from more than 100 different countries.

VP: Do you have any tips or tricks that you think others using the exchange might find useful?

Wayne Lin: With the increase in revenue, and increase in control over impressions, Direct Media Exchange was able to help us streamline management of our ad networks and increase both real and potential revenue at no cost and risk to us. Therefore, I highly recommend that other publishers spend some time getting familiar with the Direct Media Exchange platform. Play around for a while and you will find ways to improve your revenue very easily and efficiently.

VP: Do you have any final thoughts on this “exchange concept” (network transparency and competition, the utility of having just one login, etc.)?

Wayne Lin: I am expecting DMX will have more and more quality networks join in and eventually benefit the publisher even more.

VP: Wayne, thank you for being part of our exchange.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.