Kwoff Blog

We’ve been fighting spammers since our early days here at Kwoff. Of course the nature of Kwoff’s voting system means it never gets ‘Published’ but as we display incoming items on the Front Page it creates a lot of ‘noise’ that we could all do without….a’la

I'm sure there lovely girls, but who trusts a free site?

Anti Spam Arsenal

So over the last year we’ve tried several methods, all with some degree of success. With each of them overlapping and working together we have cut out a large chunk. Heres a list of them:

1) Akismet - The great wordpress solution is a godsend

2) Spam word filters - We have tapped into a list of Spammy words used in submissions like ‘Viagra’ and ‘SEO’

3) IP Filtering - over 90% of spam submissions comes from  Spamdexing bots which operate behind fixed IP address’s, blocking out these IP’s is an ongoing process but quite effective.

4) Geo Filtering - A slant on IP filtering enables us to block submitters from certain geographies and more recently we’ve added several counties to that list. The main ‘Axis of Spam Evil’ culprits are the Philipines, India and Romania, so any Kwoffers from those countries will have a hard time submitting, sorry.

False Positives

(i.e. sometimes the good guys get caught in our anti spam measures)

If you get caught up in any of the measures mentioned above while submitting something legitimate we do have a manual method of review which should save it and bring it back onto the front page, if you see this happening and it doesn’t resurface please drop us a note.

The End Result

Working together they eliminate a lot of the rubbish links on the site. We hope it improves the Kwoff experience for everybody.

We have been included in the share list on the central ABC news list.

The 'drop down' list for sharing on abc.net.au/news

There implementation is nice offering a drop down box once you click on the ’share’ option.

Its great to be found here, its my central source of news throughout the day!

Thanks to Craig McCosker and his team for including us.

Stephen, Greg and I had a chat with Lara Sinclair at the Oz last week, it resulted in some great coverage in the Media section today.

Kwoff In Print alongside the Photogenic Regators (excuse the poor scan)

It was their 10th Anniversary edition and we shared the pages with some notable media luminaries of the past decade, (Packer, Murdoch, Stokes etc were all represented in various articles).

We also shared the spread with the Aussie founders behind US startup Regator, they have some World Domination ambitions and with that i wish them well.

News.com.au

The yarn turned up at News.com.au in the technology section by mid morning and the traffic spike was noticeable as the direct links sent anyone reading directly to us (Thanks Dave, Paul and the rest of the team). With no links on the article on the Oz website its harder to measure although their was an unusually high number (250) of Google searches for Kwoff today.

Nice to get some recognition, would have been nicer next week when the site will have a new look (our best yet), lets hope those that visited today will stick around to see it.

Thanks

Dan

We had a traffic bounce over the Pauline Hanson photo drama.

It was a well kwoff’d item to begin with but thanks to Google search traffic meant it was the most viewed story in a 24 hours period and lead to a 10,000 visitor day for us last Sunday and a little less on the Monday.

Here’s a snap of our getclicky stat collecter early Sunday morning:

I knew porn was a popular Google search term, but Pauline Porn?

SO it looks like SEO is working well, most visitors went straight onto the link but a few hung around and registered.

Google itself obviously got a great workover from those hunting for images of the comeback politician, its amazing how much interest she can still generate (or was it the pron angle?)

Note: worryingly she started following me on twitter this morning! maybe she found us while Googling herself?

My post on Contra Ads alluded to the work required to prepare the banners themselves, for this job i dug up an old deli.cio.us bookmark for a banner design outfit called Right Banners.

I’d found them advertising their service on various web design sites with the simple catch cry of $US38 per banner graphic (for all standard ad sizes). The process and quality behind such an offer intrigued me, so i rolled the dice and ordered a 300×250 to appear on those sites that were returning our contra favor.

The Order Process

A static ad can convey only so much info so i opted for the ‘2nd frame’ option in the order menu, which is delightfully simple.

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The beautifully simple order form (it lives right on the front page!)

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Once ordered they zoom you off to a rego then paypal page and its done. without doubt the simplest order process i’ve come across on the web. The simplicity had me assuming a very long wait, a shitty graphic or both.

Creative and Delivery

They promise a quick turnaround and within 4 working hours i had a first draft and was pleasantly surprised. They’d performed on both the response and quality front. They update via an email that includes a direct link to the files produced, thats right plural, you get two creatives to choose from, here they are….

Option A - Flashy!

Option B - Less impact, more appropriate

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I was immediately impressed with the quality of both, less so the flashy transition effect of option A, so I concentrated on the more straight forward Option B. It showed some nice attention to detail especially in the background ’soft focus’ news print.

Collaboration

I thought i’d ask to have it refined as the ’strap line’ dominated proceedings and i was interested in getting the Kwoff name out there as much as anything else. For this sort of collaboration the download page also offered a comment field and i made the simple request to enlarge the Logo by 20% and minimise all else by 20%, I also asked for a fade effect rather than the slide between transitions.

4 hours later we received the following:

Looking the goods (but the file size is too large)

Perfect, except for one thing, the file now weighed over 70k (too much) so i made a request to trim it down, an hour later came the final result, weighing in at 20k it was spot on. The transitions not quite as smooth but it looks the same as above so i wont bore you with more graphics.

All in all a very positive experience and for approx $AU60 it registers as ‘value packed’ in my book. Highly Recommended.

We’ve finally added the kwoff link into the download below of the Sociable sharing Pugin for WordPress.

You can see it featured at the bottom of this post, it enables any reader to submit or email a given post to social sites like Kwoff, del.icio.us, Twitter etc. with one click.

Its a great plugin and we’re hoping to be part of the official download soon (I’m trying some donation bribery with the author to accelerate), and i’ll update you if we make it.

In the meantime, anyone willing to take their life in their hands can download it HERE (Right click and save) and unpack and upload to your WP plugin directory, then enable in the admin plugin tab.

Its a very nicely resolved plugin. Thanks Joost.

Our new ad serving system allows us to mix paid ads with ‘other’ material, we can set this to a particular ratio or simply revert to non paid when we run out of paid inventory.

Contra Ads

Currently the ‘other’ material we are running includes ads for sites who are returning the favour and running a Kwoff ad. Money doesnt change hands in this scenario which means, even though i’ve classed them in the ‘non-paid’ category, they are saving money, as traffic like this can easily cost .25c a click. This is known as ‘Contra’ in industry parlance.

House Ads

I’m also developing a graphic that describes some site functionality and this can be run with a vew to introduce users to a new feature or alert users to a blog post etc. these are termed ‘House ads’.

Cost Effective

sans the opportunity cost of serving paid ads, Its a good way to reach users and support partners cost effectively. Of course you’ve got to pay to develop your own graphics, without an inhouse design person we go to market to get this done.

Kwoff 'News You Choose' Banner

Bit piece work like an ad graphic is not going to get too many designers excited, so for this i went to Right Banners and you can see the results above. It was an interesting experience and at $US48 was nice and cheap. I’ll blog specifically about the process tomorrow.

Thanks New Matilda and The Roar

So thanks to the Rod and the team at New Matilda for running our ad, we’ve been sending a few visitors there way for the last week also. Its a great read which is updated with articles throughout the day, if you haven’t already visited, i recommend it.

Thanks also to our long standing mates at The Roar who are doing similar.

A little more color at kwoff

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After plenty of sticks, stones and name calling regarding the old look Kwoff, we’ve redesigned the site and are happy enough with the result to set it free today.

Its a little easier on the eye and includes more space for content as well as some ads, but you can relax, the ads are pretty easy to avoid if your not into that type of thing.

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More ‘Real Estate’

We’ve kept the Three column layout but the format now detects the width of your browser screen and adapts accordingly (see more on ‘liquid’ layouts here).

Increasingly, those visiting Kwoff are getting wider screens:

Kwoff Visitors - Breakdown of Screen Resolutions

Our largest single group (34%) see web life at a width of 1024 pixels, however, most of the remaining smaller groups access the web at 1200 pixels or above.

Those users will see a lot more of Kwoff on their screens.

Display Ads on Kwoff

The new dynamic layout has also allowed us to include the most popular advertising format at the moment (300 x 250 pixels).

We’re going to host this size on all pages of the site.

Users are able to minimise these ads if they’re not to your liking (based on previous feedback).

Clicking on the top right ‘minimise’ option shrinks the ad space.

Naturally, we hope people keep it open and click on anything that peeks their interest, but we fully appreciate some do not ’subscribe’ (and we cant stop said visitors from using ad blockers, so why not make it easier for them)

Types of Ads

We’re continuing to work with agencies to attract an appropriate stream of these display ads.

By appropriate i mean the ads must be:

1) Inoffensive - And ideally entertaining but most importantly the content must be relevant to an Australian audience.

2) Financially worth our while - There are some very ‘low ball’ ad providers out there who expect something for nothing.

Both seem within our reach, but we’ll see how the advertising market holds up in the coming months ( we are expecting demand from advertisers to ‘wane’)

Google Contextual Ads

Occasional Google 'Contextual' Ad

We’re also adding the well known Google contextual ads. They can be found in some of the hover boxes that appear when users place their mouse over a stories title to read the summary.

The ad will takes its ‘context’ from the title of the item, so we hope they have a high degree of relevance.

There will be no more than three in total amongst all of the stories on the front page, so we’re hoping they fit neatly in the unobtrusive category.

We’d like to claim that there low display frequency is a continuation of our ‘don’t bombard the users with ads’ philosophy, but as much as anything its a limitation imposed by Google on the number of ads on a given page.

So, there you have it. Please let us know what you think.

Many of you would have read yesterdays Salvo broadside at the Alcohol Ad industry (pdf here). I expect we will hear a lot more from all involved over the coming months, i look forward to it unfolding on Kwoff.

Kwoff’s Anecdotal 2c Worth

I’ve spent the last couple of months scouting out ad revenue options for Kwoff and in the process have met many fellow publishers. Many of these small publishers have openly discussed their interest in securing booze industry ad’s as they are known for being amongst the most lucrative available.

There also known for being stitched up by the larger publishers in deals done directly with agencies.

Opportunity for Online Niche publishers?

The Ad Industry will scramble to act in an effort to preserve its self regulating position. They will cop it in the neck for the ‘indiscriminate’ nature of showing ads via billboard and free to air TV.

Perhaps niche publishers can offer an alternative? If you can define an ‘appropriate’ audience why not ‘responsibly serve’ an ad?

There’s plenty of holes in this idea, but i thought i’d throw it out there. There is a lot of smaller publishers that would benefit from advertisers/agencies paying attention, i’d like to think the benefit would be mutual.

(Note: I have not sort any similar Ad deal for Kwoff - although i’m open to any contra with producers of kwoffable red out there!)

Its been great to see a few more Publishers take the ’social news’ plunge and add kwoff links in recent weeks.

Chief among these is Australias biggest selling ‘real world’ paper, Melbournes ‘Herald Sun‘. Each addition represents an increase in traffic and credibility for us and it also adds to the volume of items ‘kwoffed’.

We are really greatful to all publishers who include us.

Regional Additions

Capital City publishers like the Herald Sun are great exposure, but regional representation is very important. Sometimes the most interesting stories happen in out of the way places

With this in mind its great to see some rural and regional publishers adding Kwoff as a Social News option. Both Fairfax and News ltd have come to the party here with some great sites including the Canberra Times, Illawara Mercury and national rural publication ‘The Weekly Times‘:

It will be great to see what bubbles up from this exposure.