So we're launching an ad network... AND overhauling our search infrastructure
Posted by Richard Jalichandra on June 17, 2008
It’s been a while – – we’ve had our heads down focused on building the business, so we’ve been a little quiet lately. I wanted to bring things up to date with what’s new today as well as fill you in on our core search business.
So we’re launching an ad network…
Why? Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed and to bring audiences to blog content. Given our unique position of running a blog search engine, an ad network geared towards helping blog and social media publishers at every level to make some money just made sense.
We’ve been successful attracting premium brand advertisers to Technorati.com – and we’d like to extend those relationships for bloggers, as well as give our advertisers the deeper reach into blogging and social media they’ve been asking for.
Our first step was a private beta. We assembled a core of like-minded sites, founded to provide community and services to bloggers and to surface the best of blog content to consumers, and were successful in attracting advertisers to the network including: T-Mobile, Toyota, and Verizon.
These sites form the base of the Technorati network’s vertical content channels and reach an audience of 17 million (with that audience increasing very shortly with several other sites about to sign). Over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals. Here’s some of who’s in so far:
• blogtalkradio
• Blogcritics
• blogcatalog
• BlogTV
• GeekAlerts
• GPSMagazine
• NerdApproved
• Technabob
That doesn’t mean we’re moving away from our core. We’ve organized the company into two operating groups – the network and Technorati.com. Blog search is still and will always be the foundation of everything we do.
In our biggest internal initiative, we’re in the midst of a summer-long project to completely rewrite our crawler and search engine. Last week, Dorion addressed some of our recent challenges and fixes. An updated search infrastructure should address of the vast majority of the complaints we receive, greatly reduce spam and give everyone a faster, more efficient utility. You’ll also see significant upgrades to blog claiming and Technorati Authority. Our product team has also spent a lot of this year getting feedback directly from the blogging community and incorporated this into the development of our widgets – as we roll them out a lot of you will recognize what you see.
You’ll see some new features designed for our readers as well, but I’ll leave this for a future update.
