This summer, it will be 3 years since Ad Chap’s inception of providing social advertising on facebook and other social networks. In that time, we have not been able to get to the scale needed to be a major player in the advertising space. Accordingly, we have recently made the hard decision to discontinue the operation of Ad Chap.

Publishers should plan to replace their Ad Chap ad codes with another ad network. You will have until 01:00AM EST, on Monday May 26th, 2010. At this time we will be switching off all ad serving and ads will no longer be delivered to your apps and pages.

Effective immediately, we will be operating with a limited staff.

We will be aiming to settle publisher payments and advertiser refunds by the 15th of June, 2010. All final payments and refunds will be made between June 1 and June 15, 2010.

Last, but not least, we also would like to give a big thanks to all publishers, advertisers and customers for your custom over the last few years. It has been a pleasure to meet and serve all of you.

The Hyves social network, one of the most popular websites and social networks in the Netherlands, is the most recent addition to the Ad Chap advertising network. With one of the highest penetration rates in the industry, Hyves represents a huge opportunity to application developers and advertisers alike; its estimated that over 1/3 of the entire population of the Netherlands is using Hyves, leading many high-profile Dutch celebrities to join the service (perhaps most notably Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende).

Currently Hyves boasts over nine million users, up two million users from July, 2008. Currently 95% of the traffic to the Hyves.nl domain comes from within the Netherlands. Hyves demographics are somewhat different than those of some other social networks, largely because of the predominantly Dutch population of the social network.

Hyves users fall predominantly within the 15 25 age bracket, with over 28% of their user base counted in this age bracket. Additionally, a significant 12% of Hyves user base is under the age of 15, a significant figure when compared to other social networks, particularly Twitter, which is notoriously devoid of the teenage demographic. Hyves youthful population is particularly attractive to celebrities, political figures and others interested in connecting with the youth of the Netherlands; younger generations can be difficult to connect with, and Hyves is one of the ways that important people in the Netherlands are bridging that age gap.

A significant 20% of Hyves users do not report their age; its probably safe to assume that these users are fairly evenly spread across the bell-curve distribution of age groups. Hyves shows strong popularity among users aged 25 45, and as those age groups (and the Hyves social network) age, the 45+ age demographic can be expected to fill out somewhat.

When it comes to gender distribution, Hyves is a very balanced social network; there is a slightly larger proportion of women to men on the social network, which mirrors the trend in social networking in general. Almost 10% of Hyves users dont report their gender, so the true ratio of women to men on Hyves may be slightly more skewed than it appears. In terms of targeting, though, its safe to assume a nearly 50/50 balance of males to females on the Hyves network.

Looking at Hyves relationship demographics reveals some interesting trends, possibly related to cultural differences in the Netherlands; although only 20% of Hyves users dont report age, and 9% dont report gender, a massive 69% of Hyves users dont report their relationship status. Thats significantly larger than on other social networks like Facebook or Myspace, where a lesser proportion of users hide their relationship status.

Of the Hyves users that do report their relationship status, there is a fairly balanced ratio of singles, people in relationships, and married users.

In terms of usage, Hyves analytics and statistics show a robust platform with a highly engaged base of users. The Hyves.nl domain receives over 70,000 unique visitors per day, and boasts approximately 380,000 daily visits. Hyves users spend a decent amount of time each day on the Hyves.nl domain; the average visit to Hyves.nl lasts about 22 minutes. The average user views 22 pages per day on Hyves; put together, these statistics show that the average time spent per page on Hyves is approximately one minute, meaning that advertisements have a chance to sink in and get a good amount of eyeballs.

Put together, the data indicates that Hyves is a powerful, fast-growing social network with a very specific, highly engaged audience that comes back to the website several times throughout the day and spends a significant amount of time there. As the Hyves social network continues to grow, its a good bet that the older age brackets will fill out, as parents, professionals, and other older users find more and more reasons to join the social network. Whats more, the incredible penetration rate among users from the Netherlands can be expected to cause a positive feedback loop, with more and more Dutch users joining the site because so many peers are already using it.

Since many residents of the Netherlands speak both English and Dutch as native languages, they represent a big opportunity for advertisers in both languages. In short, Hyves is a great place for advertisers and developers alike to reach out to the youth of the Netherlands, and, possibly, the rest of the world, as Hyves non-Dutch user base is also expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.

We have been listening to social networking application publishers needs and one of the things they have been asking for is a better way to manage their traffic for all their social applications, across all social networks and across all Ad Networks.

We have built just that.

Features
Serve Ad from Multiple Ad Networks
Manage your traffic and ad serving for all of your ad networks from one interface. We now allow you to enter the ad code of the other ad networks you are using.

Application and Ad Space Level
To start off, many will want to manage the traffic on an application and ad space level. Lets take app ABC on facebook. This means that you can choose any ad space on app ABC and split the traffic. Lets say it is a 250×250 square ad on the home page of app ABC and you want to split all traffic between three ad networks. 33% Ad Chap, 33% Network A, 33% Network B. No problem with the new Ad Chap Traffic Manager.

Country Level Traffic Management
We offer traffic and ad serving management down to the country level. Want to give 23% / 30% / 20% / 27% of USA traffic to four different ad networks, and the rest of countries split 25 / 25/ 25/ 25? No problem. You can also set each country’s traffic separately down to this level of detail if you like.

Dynamic Changes
Once it is set up for your ad space(s) on your app, you can change the percentage of traffic sent to each ad network, add an ad network, replace an ad network and make other changes to your heart’s content. No more changing the ad codes on your apps a hundred times.

Statistics
We can only track your costs and revenue on our own Ad Chap network so we have kept your Ad Chap statistics and all other 3rd party statistics separate. Your Ad Chap served ads will still give you the same real time statistics you have already been getting. For 3rd party served ads, we give you textual and graphical statistics on impressions only. We also have impressions by country in textual and graphical map formats.

Tracking Clicks and Revenue from 3rd Party Ad Networks.
We only serve the ad of a 3rd party network to your app page, after that we can not track clicks nor revenue. That will be done in the admin interface of the other network that the other ad is coming from.

Setup
We have tried to make the setup process as easy as possible. Just follow the notes and tips on each page and you should have no problems. The Traffic Manager is available under the “Manage” tab of the publisher interface.

The Cost?
There is no cost. We do require that you send a minimum of 15% of the traffic to the Ad Chap network. This helps us to cover the costs of serving ads for other networks as we don’t earn any proceeds from this new service. We feel it is a reasonable minimum percentage. If you have a very large app or large amount of traffic and need to lower this, let us know and we will try to work something out for you.

Social Networks Served
We currently accept publishers with quality traffic on the following social networks:
- bebo
- facebook
- friendster
- hi5
- hyves
- myspace
- orkut (launching in Sept 2009)
- netlog

The Ad Chap Traffic Manager service is available immediately in the Ad Chap publisher interface.

If you have any questions please contact us at support at adchap.com.

We have added the hyves.nl social network to Ad Chap. Hyves publishers, application developers and owners can now monetize your hyves social application traffic with Ad Chap.

The service is available now for publishers in the AdChap Publisher interface.

We will be posting more details and background about Hyves in a separate post in the coming week.

Netlog, the Belgian social networking website thats up-and-coming fast in the world of social networking is the latest offering on the Ad Chap network. Netlog has caught a lot of critical acclaim for using advanced localization technologies to target their varied userbase; although Netlog was originally created to target the European youth demographic, the site has since taken off internationally and sees wide usage across several demographics throughout the world.

In terms of usage patterns, Netlog has fairly good retention for a fast-growing social network; users spend, on average, almost 17 minutes / day on the netlog.com domain and localized subdomains. In terms of pageviews, over the last year Netlog has seen some ups and downs; in January, 2009, unique visitors and visits peaked, followed by a small slope off in February, which then leveled off and has remained roughly steady over the past six months.

In terms of national demographics, Netlog is a very varied social network for its size. Created for the European community, Netlog has since become quite popular across the continent. As social networking gains in popularity in those areas, we can assume that a disproportionately large portion of Netlogs userbase will hail from these countries.

Language Members
Espaol 8 897 205
English 7 528 534
Franais 6 470 199
Trke 6 333 215
Portugus 3 726 983
Italiano 3 616 781
Deutsch 3 390 745
Nederlands 2 791 155
Romn 1 364 690
Other languages 5 122 613
Total 49 242 120
In particular the Spanish demographic can be expected to grow significantly as internet access and awareness of social networking continue to skyrocket in these areas.

In general, Netlog presents a good opportunity for advertisers interested in reaching particular geographic demographics, since Netlog itself is such a varied platform in terms of language and content, and since Netlogs content distribution system already ensures that users are seeing the best content for their area, in the language they expect to see it in. Growth can be expected to continue as the social network moves forward with new features and enhancements to its popular tribes social group system. With users adding friends as quickly as they can, eyeballs on Netlog applications are expected to shoot up quickly, and their application platform makes it that much more attractive to develop and monetize applications for the Netlog social network.