We’ve selected Supernova.com as our new “Featured Publisher” .

‘’The concept is brilliant, and it works. It takes the hassle away from having to select and setup ad networks, allowing the ad publisher to pick and choose networks from one centralized system.'’
–Supernova.com Director of Interactive, Sanford Liu

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Of the sites we’ve selected so far as Featured Publishers for Direct Media Exchange, Supernova.com is unique. If you have a band, you go there, set-up your profile, and connect with other bands, fans, promoters, and more. And with a user base that is mostly made up of younger folk, Supernova realized that they were ripe for utilizing advertising as a way to further monetize this valuable demographic. Supernova is this month’s Featured Publisher for Direct Media Exchange. Supernova’s CEO is Elliott Hurst; their Director of Interactive, Sanford Liu, answered our questions.

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

Sanford Liu: Supernova’s website has been in existence since 1997 and advertising was implemented in 2006. We decided to move into web publishing because we saw that a large percentage of advertisers wanted to communicate with our very specific audience (young adolescents), which is a difficult audience to tap into. The success of opening up our advertising opportunities to the web has resulted in an alternative revenue stream for the company that was not initially anticipated. This became our second largest advertising vehicle to offer clients. In the past we were limited to promoting our clients via offline advertising and promotions only (i.e. flyers, posters, shows sponsorship, and paid editorial advertising). The implementation of our online web publishing offered our clients another complementary and cost effective means of advertising to their target audience.

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?

Sanford Liu: Supernova.com is like having every kid from every garage band in the country, and their fans, all in one room—unsupervised. First, bands register and set up profile pages. Then, we provide them with the resources to manage and interact with their fans, and allow the fans the opportunity to talk back. It’s exactly what an emerging or established band needs to keep in touch with their fans.

Supernova.com is the only music related web domain which actively promotes its bands by producing live events to showcase their talents. Our web 2.0 community allows bands to further interact with their fans, the music industry, and our partners.

Our old site that existed from 1997 to early-2007 was purely informational where bands could sign up to be booked into live gigs. Now we have become a fully interactive site with more features to be released each month. The previous site was not optimizing our advertising space and we were not able to maximize advertising revenue.

With our newly launched site, ad placements are standardized (ie. leaderboards appear on all user profile pages, etc.) and selling advertising space is easier – we now know which pages and consequently which banners receive the most impressions and clicks. Our new design also makes a huge difference because advertisers want to associate with a slick and clean design rather than a cluttered site.

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?

Sanford Liu: With the new site we definitely saw advertising revenue as a huge enabler of maintenance. The initial problems that we had when we did our alpha launch in June was that we had an advertiser on board and we were unable to reach the targeted impressions in the IO. We had thought that certain pages were going to have more exposure than others and these were the ones we put advertising on initially due to wire frame creation. We were surprised to see the pages that we didn’t expect to do as well as others, actually make up a majority of our traffic.

Pricing was also a huge issue. We did a competitive analysis of similar sites, and we also met with a few consultants in order to accurately price our inventory. Since our site is so niche and targeted towards teens and young adults with a passion for music, it took a few attempts to get the pricing right, especially since we discovered this niche was so valuable and difficult to access. We also had to figure out how to offer products and services that our users would appreciate rather than be annoyed by. Finding a balance to not be accused of ‘selling out’ was necessary.

And Google Adwords, if used properly can definitely contribute a little bit of revenue.

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

Sanford Liu: Firstly having a very low budget, the fact that it’s free was a huge asset. The interface is so simple to use, and being novices in the ad publishing industry, we needed something that wouldn’t require weeks of training to learn to use properly.

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?

Sanford Liu: It’s very easy to use – other ad servers require that you upload a banner into your folder, then create an advertiser’s account, then create a campaign, then locate the banner, then set about 50 different constraints when all you want it to do is show up on your homepage. Being able to control frequency and level of importance by CPM is great – it’s real world rather than setting levels and priorities.

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

Sanford Liu: Pick and choose ad networks that are relevant to your site. We found some ad networks served placements that didn’t necessarily appeal to our demographic so posting their ads was a waste of an impression. Carefully monitoring which ads are being served by which networks and selecting ads that are most likely to be clicked by your demographic is the best way to optimize your inventory.

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

Sanford Liu: The concept is brilliant, and it works. It takes the hassle away from having to select and setup ad networks, allowing the ad publisher to pick and choose networks from one centralized system.

VP: Thanks for being a member of Direct Media Exchange.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 4:39 pm and is filed under 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.