ARTICLES & DISCUSSION

How the bidding system works

Digital Point Ads has a feature filled bidding system that works across all ad types. Site owners can set minimum bids, and from there advertisers can bid for ad space. Bids take into account site areas, geographical location of the end-user viewing/clicking the ad, etc.

All bids are automatically downward bid so that advertisers can simply set a maximum amount they are willing to pay, but their actual cost of never more than $0.01 more than the next highest bidder.

WHO’S USING?

There are currently hundreds of sites using Digital Point Ads to serve ads. This is a small sampling of some of the larger ones (more coming soon).

  • Digital Point
    Digital Pointdigitalpoint.com
  • Famous Plastic
    Famous Plasticfamousplastic.com

HISTORY

When we started

Digital Point Solutions itself was started in 1995 (under the name Data Point Solutions) and in 1999, we changed our name to Digital Point Solutions.

Digital Point Ads was started as an in-house advertising system in the summer of 2010 that was originally designed just for digitalpoint.com (more info below). Towards the end of 2010 we opened Digital Point Ads up for other sites to use as a beta. In early 2011, it was opened up for any site to use.

Why we started

We run a fairly high traffic site, and companies were constantly asking us if they could advertise on our site. We just turned them away because we didn’t have a system setup to allow them to do it (it needed to be automated so we weren’t messing wtih adding/deleting ads ourselves). Because of this, Digital Point Ads has been something on our “to-do” list for years.

There was an incident where Google incorrectly suspended our AdSense account for a few days (more about that here). Eventually our AdSense account was fully reinstated, but we did lose out on ad revenue for 5 days. Ultimately that got us to thinking that we didn’t want our ad revenue to be 100% reliant on a third party and subject to their internal errors. So our “in-house advertising” system moved higher up on the priority list, and the first version was live within a few days.

Originally, we had no intention of it being used for any site outside of digitalpoint.com, but advertisers seemed to really like it and we were getting a ton of requests asking if they could use it on sites they own… So before too long, we rebuilt the entire system from scratch so that digitalpoint.com was simply a site within the system and Digital Point Ads could be used by any number of sites.