XA.net’s CEO Rob Leathern has taken Facebook’s most recent user numbers and extrapolated growth rates for the top countries, based on published populations. Take  a look at Facebook growth ‘by the numbers’:

http://bit.ly/facebook500mm

As participants at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco happening August 16th to 20th at Moscone West, XA.net is happy to extend a 20% discount on conference passes to any one interested in increasing their knowledge of SEM, SEO, and social media strategies and tactics.

Enter priority code “SPGSF20″ during the registration process to receive 20% off.

XA.net CEO and founder Rob Leathern will be featured as a panelist during the Introduction to Remarketing session taking place Tuesday, August 17th, 4:15pm – 5:15pm. Search Engine Strategies is part of the larger inaugural Connected Marketing Week, which also includes events produced by the IAB and Online Marketing Summit.

Contact us if you would like to meet up during the week!

Monday, July 19th, XA.net proudly participated at OMMA Ad Nets in LA. Matt Esslinger, VP of Operations, participated in the “Grill the Vendors: Real Time Bidding” panel with senior executives from Triggit, Pubmatic, Collective Media, and AppNexus:

Here is a ustream recording of the session

Matt reinforced XA.net’s position that, while RTB is crucially important in the online ad industry for its transparency and efficiency and will continue to grow strongly, advertisers cannot yet abandon traditional tag-based CPM buying models, where the majority of publisher inventory still exists.

In this iMedia Connection article, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern discusses the evolution of the online advertising market, the nature and definition of the “DSP” and some of the developments the online display market has seen over the past 24 months.

XA.net has been one of the pioneers in the DSP space, providing media buying technologies and services to advertisers since 2008. We have built and own all our own technologies for campaign management, realtime bidding and audience management, and love what we do!

We are excited to announce that Matt Esslinger, XA.net’s VP of Operations, will be a featured panelist for next week’s OMMA Ad Nets. Matt will be put on the spot to give the straight-talk about real time bidding (RTB) alongside industry counterparts from Triggit, Collective, AppNexus, and partner Pubmatic:

Grill the Vendors: Real Time Bidding

According to some predictions, up to a third of network advertising may be moving through real-time bidding systems by the end of this year. This latest technology trend promises to match the right ad to the right person within milliseconds of their entering the page. The technology and the algorithms are complex, but do they always work as advertised? Do agencies and brands know what they are buying…and what they are buying into? Are the RTB systems out there working in the publisher’s best interests or the media buyers? We bring in some of the top competitors in the field for a class OMMA grilling in order to determine how RTB vendors differentiate themselves and answer the hard questions both publishers and media buyers must bring to the table.

If you’re going to be at the event and would like to catch up with us, send us an email.

Register and Get $400 Off OMMA Ad Nets with Code: ADNETSXA

The code is only good for the first 20 registrants, so act now!

The conference takes place on Monday, July 19, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, located on 2025 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles. We hope to see you there!

This Ad Age blog article quotes data from comScore on average CPMs, with social media by virtue of its large volume of time/pages/ads (mostly Facebook) driving down the webwide average CPM.

In the piece, Ad Age mentions that the two largest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, represent more than a fifth of all advertising traffic, but are only drawing an average $.56 CPM compared to the $2.43 CPM average for the internet at large. In fact, the averages for the largest player, Facebook may even be lower than that.

I don’t believe that thinking about the “average” CPM is that helpful – because as we know, impressions are not commodities (if they were,  our lives would be a WHOLE lot easier!). Instead of considering how a handful of large social media sites are pushing down the average CPM, we think social media represents a very exciting opportunity for advertisers for the following reasons:

• There is a low initial starting point in terms of budget to get started with these systems
• Connection-based targeting opportunities offer an intriguing targeting prospect
• Social media ad systems like Facebook’s allow for easy demographic-based buying
• Conversion tracking is now directly possible on some of these social media sites (earlier one had to use redirects)
• Text plus image ads are easier to iterate than graphical banners, meaning many more tests can be run in parallel, more quickly
• Perceptually, low CPMs on social media sites appear to be a good opportunity to start testing ad concepts, and lower some of the barriers for advertising

Tools like XA.net’s Text Ad Creator (with our Facebook advertising API integration) can help automate the creation and optimization of tens or hundreds of different creative/landing page combinations, to allow for more efficient and effective advertising. Contact us to learn more. In terms of connection-based targeting, XA.net can target (with your permission) the fans of your pages or applications using our system — so definitely let us know if you would like us to do that for you!

XA.net CEO Rob Leathern has been confirmed as a panelist for the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco (SES) conference taking place August 16-20th at Moscone West. SES, now in it’s 12th year, is the leading search and social marketing event, and part of the larger Connected Marketing Week, which includes events hosted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Online Marketing Summit (OMS).

Rob will be featured on Tuesday, August 17th as a panelist during “Introduction to Remarketing”. In this session industry experts will share their experiences with Remarketing (also known as retargeting) and the impact it has had on advertisers’ overall ROI. The panelists will also address the lack of awareness and the issues that have arisen surrounding Remarketing as a result.

I was having a discussion with a friend on IM, explaining to him one aspect of how RTB works. I thought I’d share it here.

It’s kind of like the Miss Wisconsin beauty pageant. Lots of young women who meet the organizers’ criteria enter the pageant. There is a judging process which ends in the selection of a Miss Wisconsin. Miss Wisconsin (MW) then qualifies to go the Miss America pageant. There is travel, lodging, rehearsals and activities but eventually the big day arrives where MW gets to take the stage in her quest to win the Miss America crown. There can be only one winner but along the way ladies like MW have experienced intermediate glory.

So think of Wisconsin as our real-time bidding system, and what happens there as the Miss Wisconsin pageant. For every impression in an ad exchange or aggregator (Miss America pageant) there can be only one winner, and so every bidder (state) puts forth their absolute best. California, Arizona and Delaware all want to win that pageant – and they’ve all held their own pageants ahead of time to put forth that one winner to go through to the final. Now some might argue that California is bigger and better than many of the other states (budget deficits notwithstanding) and should get more entrants into the Miss America pageant, but hey – this isn’t a representative democracy! One entrant per state only please!

Now think of 10,000 pageants a second and you’re starting to get the idea.

For RTB each bidder is conducting some kind of real-time assessment before deciding which bid to place on a given impression. It could be a complex or simple assessment, but more complex internal real-time decisions (local pageants) mean less time to prepare and compete at nationals.