The ZENPRESS Advertising Management System
Another one of our innovations is the concept of persistent ads. In most commercial Web sites, advertisements are rotated among advertisers. An advertiser will buy a certain number of impressions (times the page is seen by readers) and when that impression count runs out, the ad goes away.
| We are very near the completion of ZENPRESS 3.0, which will offer a radical improvement to our ad management system. What's documented here represents ZENPRESS 2.0, which is still quite powerful.
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In ZATZ publications, advertisements run for a specific period of time, usually a month. Many of our advertisements are also persistent, meaning that they don't go away. While a publication's Home Page changes each day (with the latest news) and the Daily News Page also changes each day, the actual issue pages do not. The Table of Contents for a given issue is going to stay the Table of Contents for that issue, in perpetuity. The same is true of each of that issue's articles, as well as its masthead.
In virtually all other Web sites, the ad on a given page would be whatever was due in rotation at that time. If you were a reader, and like with a print magazine, remember that you saw a cool ad in March, you couldn't go back and look at it, or click through to the advertiser.
However, in ZATZ publications, that ad is persistent, meaning that the ad that was purchased for the March Table of Contents for PalmPower -- which happens to be an ad for Dilbert on the PalmPilot -- will always be the ad for Dilbert on the PalmPilot. In this way, readers can count on ads being where they remember them and advertisers get ongoing promotion even months after the issue goes into the back list.
If we produced print publications, this would be normal. But in the Web world, it' s outright outrageous that we don’t rotate or cycle our ads in the publication itself based on traffic or impressions in the publication. This is absolutely unusual and probably unique online, although we're beginning to see some folks say that they want to copy this approach.
This does not track through to our News Pages and our Home Pages, which change daily, but anything that is specific to an issue does have persistent advertising.
The ZENPRESS Advertising Management System controls all this. Whenever an issue is imported into ZENPRESS, the software determines if an ad is to be persistent and makes sure the ad remains active in subsequent issues.
When ads are brought into the ZENPRESS database, ZENPRESS can automatically retrieve and test the destination Web page for each advertiser's URL. This allows us to dynamically test and very quickly confirm that we've got a valid Web address for each advertisement.
ZENPRESS also has a click tracking system. Every time a reader clicks on an ad, the click tracking system records that into it's own internal database. An interactive Web form, secured by user IDs and passwords, allows ZATZ personnel to review the effectiveness of any ad, at any given time.
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