With the age of the ubiquitous cell phone (and other mobile devices), it seemed time to feature one of our Direct Media Exchange publishers that deals with this unique niche. Justin Siegel is the CEO of Mocospace.com , and it’s all about community building within the mobile space. His site also finished as a finalist in Handango’s 2006 Champion Awards in the ‘Best New Application’ category.

And he’s also effectively monetizing his site through leveraging our Direct Media Exchange…

—

Vince Panero (VP): How did you get interested in web publishing originally? What were those early days like for you?

Justin Siegel: The main thrust of our product is to deliver a great community experience on mobile devices. That said, we do believe that people should be able to access their community from wherever is most convenient for them, so we built a web interface in addition to our mobile one. The early days of our website were slow, but we’ve steadily seen the traffic gain steam, and it continues on a terrific trajectory today.

VP: 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?

Justin Siegel: MocoSpace.com is one of the leading sites on the mobile Internet. Our model is totally ad supported. Well, as a mobile community site, the biggest issue to overcome is incorporating advertising onto the small screen with minimal disruption to the user experience.

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?

Justin Siegel: Yes, we always counted on monetizing the website with ad dollars.

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

Justin Siegel: Traffic to our site is significant enough now that it makes sense for us to look at ways of optimizing our ad dollars by deriving it from different sources.

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

Justin Siegel: Yes, eCPMs have increased.

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?

Justin Siegel: I like that it allows us to optimize our ad dollars by sourcing from a variety of partners. In addition, I like that we’re able to leverage the platform to serve ads that our sales team sells directly.

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

Justin Siegel: I think the exchange concept is a no brainer, but in the case of Right Media, it’s also well executed, which is the toughest part of turning a no brainer concept into a business.

VP: Thanks, Justin, for being part of our exchange.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under About Right Media, Right Media Exchange, Publishers. 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.