Yieldbuild Review / Casestudy
Since Techcrunch just mentioned Yieldbuild, a company I love, in YieldBuild Raises $6 Million Series B For Optimizing Ads, I figure that now is a good time to throw in my two bits. If you don’t know, Yieldbuild is the internet’s premier advertising optimization tool, boosting webmaster CPM and CTR. Crunch says it uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize your site’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network. The system continually tests alternative configurations of layouts, networks, and color, looking for the highest performing ones.”
Does it really work? Check out this chart:
The answer is simply yes–it improved CPM on my blog network by 21%. If you discount revenue from other blogs, this one went from 1.51 CPM to 2.51 CPM, an increase of 66% just due to using Yieldbuild. Now that I have a fulltime job, I don’t have time to bang out optimized advertising solutions. If you’re like this, why not let Yieldbuild do it for you?
It was worse last time
The Techmeme page for iPhone new isn’t as bad this time. If you look an archive you’ll see it’s taken over with news about the iPhone 2.0 and SDK, but not too badly:
Yes, it was much worse a year ago, when the iPhone was first announced at Macworld by Steve Jobs. There, the Techmeme page got extremely long, and covered in Apple news.
IE8: Acid Test Passes
You’ll be surprised to see that Internet Explorer 8 Beta (8.0.6001.14184) does better on the Acid2 test than Firefox 2 (2.0.0.12) does:
Safari also passes the Acid2 test, but nobody uses it
The results are far worse on the Acid3 test, with IE8 scoring 17% and Firefox scoring 50%, but I believe they are intended. See, when Microsoft releases Beta 2 of their browser, it will definitely pass the Acid3 tests to give the community just that much more shock and awe:
Safari gets 39%, yay?
Ironically, the IE8 website throws an error when viewed with IE8. I guess that’s what they mean by improved standards compliance:
Worse, the Official Microsoft Site prompts to install some nasty, spyware-looking ActiveX control to view the IE8 site:
Congratulations Microsoft, on passing the Acid2, but unfortunately you have a laundry list of things to do, not limited to (a) make it faster and lighter than Firefox, (b) build in good developer tools, (c) get rid of ActiveX, (d) make a more usable UI, or (e) fix your own website to work in IE.