Tag Archives: bragroll

Kontera Quotes ME in $10.3Million Funding Press Release

Posted on by
Reply

Kontera Secures $10.3 Million in Funding Led by Carmel Ventures
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ — Kontera, the leading In-Text Advertising (SM) solution provider for web publishers and advertisers, announced today that it has secured $10.3 million in their second round of funding from Carmel Ventures with participation by Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. Rina Shainski, General Partner of Carmel Ventures, will be joining the board of Kontera….

The Press Release goes on to read:

…”Kontera’s ContentLink In-Text Advertising is a great way for a web publisher to easily monetize their website without being intrusive or spammy,” said GrownUpGeek (http://grownupgeek.com/) website and blog founder Randy Brown, “and a great complement for AdSense.”

How I did it:
I did not have a lot of control over this particular bit of press-release-love. Our site does very well with Kontera (see the rest of the blog on how I did that), and I have a good relationship with my Kontera account-manager. I think it was this good relationship and ongoing communication with my account manager, combined with high earnings and a quality, non-spammy website that put us on the short-list for an interview with the Kontera folks – ultimately resulting in being included on this press release.

For the full press release see: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070813/lnm002.html?.v=3 it is also available via the Kontera.com homepage, under the “News and Press” section.

Google Adsense Blogs about GrownUpGeek.com

Posted on by
3

More love from the Google Adsense team (but no links!).

In today’s Google Adsense Blog post, they featured GrownUpGeek.com and put a link to their first referrals-based Adsense Case Study which also features us.


To recap: Google has now featured/posted about us on three separate occasions

  1. Adsense Referrals Case Study
  2. Referrals optimization Tips Page
  3. Inside Adsense Blog Post

I wonder if this means our 15 minutes of fame is over now?

Grown Up Geek featured by Google Adsense again

Posted on by
1

Last week I made a post about GrownUpGeek.com being one of the new Adsense Case Studies, aka Success Stories.

In this week’s installment of Google Adsense love, I would like to direct your attention to this new post at the Adsense support website: Google Adsense Referrals

Once again I was caught by surprise when I literally stumbled across this page today. I had made a post at the DP Forums regarding this page at the Google Adsense support site about two weeks ago because it explains how webmasters are now allowed to more freely draw attention to their referral links and buttons. Since I fancy myself an “AdSense Referrals master” I thought I should let everyone at DP know about Google’s newly clarified position on referrals. Today I was making a new post at DP which mentioned my post from two weeks ago – when I checked the page again, I was surprised to see our page!

Another pleasant surprise.. Now I’m going to bed…

UPDATE: Since Google has retired the Firefox Referral program, the page mentioned above has been removed.

New AdSense Case Study Published

Posted on by
14

One night back in September of this year I received an email from someone claiming to be from Google Adsense’s marketing team asking if I would like to be interviewed for possible inclusion as an Adsense case study. My first thought was that this was some kind of cruel joke, or a the newest twist on Nigerian email scams. After checking the IP in the email headers and doing a reverse-411 lookup on the phone number he gave, I was beginning to think he might be for real. As a final check, I dialed his phone number and got his voicemail, then hit “0″ and asked the operator what company I had reached. “You have reached the offices of Google sir, how may I direct your call?” – Wow, Google really had contacted me! I emailed back “Mr. X” and told him I would be happy to participate.

The telephone interview went well.. “Mr. X” was very nice and down to earth. He asked a lot of questions about the site, how we got started, why we use Adsense, how we use Referrals, what other sources of income the site has, etc. He also asked for my feedback on the Adsense system, ways I thought it could be improved – and he gave me some insight (not secrets) on how the Adsense team does things. We had a particularly lengthy discussion on “bannings” also. The entire interview was about 45 minutes long and at the end Mr. X told me that he would contact me if they decided to publish GrownUpGeek.com as a Case Study.

After not hearing back from Mr. X for a few months I figured our site did not make the cut. I mean, how many thousands if not millions of other publishers are there in the world with better/more successful sites than ours? Heck, we’re n00bs – would we deserve such an honor?!

About ten days ago as I was going through my daily Google-Alerts to see what new scraper-sites had stolen our content, I came across one entry with the Google name & URL in it. I was shocked when I saw that Google DID indeed publish GrownUpGeek.com as the newest Adsense Case Study!

I don’t think that being published as an Adsense Case study is going to generate any traffic for us, increase or PR, or change our SERPs, but to me it is one of the most flattering things that’s ever happened – validating that at least I’m doing something right. I’ve tried to descretly brag about it over at the DP Forums, but I’ve mostly kept it quiet. I guess this is the best place to toot my own horn.