John West went from the site hosting business to that of launching online gaming sites — and with a community twist. He streamlined his monetization efforts through leveraging the power of our exchange, and he’s one of our more active clients on Direct Media Exchange.

John West , and his website CrazyMonkeyGames.com, is our new Featured Publisher.

“With an ad exchange like Direct Media Exchange, everything’s automatically optimized, at least for the linked networks that participate in the auction. It’s just a much simpler and more elegant solution than default chains, frequency caps, geotargeting, etc.” -John West

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John West: My first business venture was a website hosting company. Working with our hosting clients first exposed me to the world of web publishing. I saw a lot of potential there and found it really interesting. I began reading and learning all I could about the publishing side of things. Chris Beasley’s articles at websitepublisher.net were a great resource. I gradually transitioned from hosting to publishing and now 100% of our revenue comes from publishing.

John West: Our company, Westech Media, publishes multiple websites. Most are entertainment related. Our largest and most well-known site is CrazyMonkeyGames.com. Some other representative sites are PawnGame.com and TurboGames.com. Our business model is very simple — we provide fun and engaging content to our visitors and bring in revenue through on-site advertising.

John West: I think the main things that set us apart and allow us to be successful are the relationships we’ve built with independent game developers. We pioneered the game sponsorship (link: www.crazymonkeygames.com/sponsor.php) model that you see a lot of our competitors using today. By developing close mutually beneficial relationships with quality content providers we’ve been able to consistently provide our visitors with a steady stream of high quality games.

John West: The biggest challenge I faced was overcoming my fear of failure and continuing to invest in the company and allow it to grow. When we started out I was a one man show. I handled all aspects of the company: web development, server administration, accounting, content writing, advertising management, etc. As we became larger we got to a point where there was just no way that we could continue to grow with me handling everything personally. We kind of leveled off for a while before I finally made the decision to start hiring people to help out. It was a scary decision because it cut our profits by quite a bit. It turned out to be the right decision though, because once I got the right team in place and running smoothly things really started to take off.

John West: I knew I wanted to launch an online games site, and I wanted to build a really memorable and recognizable brand around it. I knew that getting the right domain name was going to be critical, but I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on buying one from a reseller. I decided that my best hope was to somehow find an unregistered domain that met my needs. I wanted a domain that was a .com, short, memorable, and brandable.

As anyone who has tried to find one can tell you, there are hardly any .com names out there that make any kind of sense that aren’t already registered. After weeks of brainstorming and searching, late one night I came up with CrazyMonkeyGames.com and found that it was available. It met all of my requirements except for being short, but by that point I was happy with 3 out of 4!

John West: Yes, we planned from the start to support the site with ad revenue. We initially ran a mix of CPC and CPM ad network placements. The main problem we ran into from the start was that most advertising networks saw online gaming sites as a less desirable demographic. The site earned lower ad rates than other types of sites. This, combined with the extra bandwidth requirements of serving large flash files on every page gave us a pretty thin profit margin.

We’ve gradually been able to prove to both the ad networks and our direct advertisers that our ad space is valuable and does produce results. As we’ve grown we’ve also been able to reduce our bandwidth costs through economies of scale.

John West: I initially started looking at Direct Media Exchange as a way to monetize more of our less desirable inventory — the stuff that our current ad networks didn’t want or didn’t want to pay much for. Once I signed up and started looking at what was there I quickly saw that Direct Media Exchange had a lot more to offer. Once I started playing around with the interface I realized that it was the perfect ad server solution for us. We manage multiple websites, each of which uses multiple ad networks, each of which has multiple ad tags. It was always a real challenge to keep everything straight. I really like the fact that we can use the Direct Media Exchange platform as an ad server for our 3rd party networks as well as the linked networks.

John West: Our overall eCPM has increased by around 15% since we started using DMX, and it’s still gradually increasing as we become more familiar with how to use the platform to analyze and optimize our ad mix.

John West: I really like Media Guard. We’re pretty selective about the content we allow in ads on our sites. Before Direct Media Exchange , I was always hesitant to bring a new ad network into the mix because it meant learning another ad blocking interface, figuring out the standards they used to categorize ads, and making it that much more difficult to track down the culprit when the occasional objectionable ads slipped through. Now, with Media Guard, it’s easy. I just set my preferences once and they apply to all networks.

John West: I think that ad placement is always about finding the right balance between making the ads noticeable enough to produce results while not annoying visitors so much that they don’t come back to your site. From the start we’ve never used pop-ups on any of our sites, even though doing so would significantly increase our revenue. We also block expandable ads, audio ads, and other generally annoying formats. I think that a lot of webmasters overload their pages with ads to drive short-term revenue and in doing so they sacrifice the long term growth of their sites.

John West: I love the exchange concept and Right Media’s execution of it. I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours I’ve spent pouring over spreadsheets trying to optimize our ad mix. With an ad exchange like DMX, everything’s automatically optimized, at least for the linked networks that participate in the auction. It’s just a much simpler and more elegant solution than default chains, frequency caps, geotargeting, etc.

John West: My advice to newbie users would be to just jump in and try it. The interface is very easy to learn and support requests are answered very quickly. One of the great things about Direct Media Exchange is how easy it is to analyze what’s happening and make changes on the fly, so don’t be too scared of making mistakes.

For more advanced users, my favorite trick is passing the defaults from 3rd party networks back into DMX to be auctioned off again. Many times a 3rd party network will win the auction and take an impression, but then default on that impression and not fill it with a paying ad. To combat this, I set up a new site in DMX called “backfill” that uses only linked networks. Then I set up all of my 3rd party networks to send defaults to the ad tag for this DMX backfill site. This way any impressions that the 3rd party networks don’t fill get another chance to be filled with a paying ad from a linked network.

John West: It’s definitely made my life easier. It’s an ad server, ad screener, and unsold inventory clearing house for all of our sites.

John West: I’d tell myself not to over analyze and wait too long before taking action. It’s a good idea to fully analyze and perfect an investment or a business deal before jumping in, but after a certain point any further analysis is just wasting time. I probably wasted an entire year going over my plans for CrazyMonkeyGames.com before ever taking any action. After the first two months I had all of the information I needed and was just wasting time going over the same information again and again.

VP: John, thanks for being a part of our exchange.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under About Right Media, Publishers, 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.