Atomic Droplet

So, you admin a forum?

You started a forum to create a community of like minded individuals - whether your passion is dogs, motorcycles, curly hair or recipes. Now it's grown it takes effort, and steadily rising hosting costs to maintain yet there are few options for monetising this effort or offsetting the hosting costs - banner advertising has high startup and maintenance costs; and javascript text adverts bring little (or no) actual revenue. What we need is some middle ground.

This, then, is why I created this service. Atomic Droplet is a new advertising network designed to provide ad-serving, revenue collection and client management exclusively for the web forum community. By providing a service shared across many forums, and many administrators, it becomes possible to take advantage of the economies of scale necessary to make this 'work' while remaining sensitive to the needs of a forum and it's community. Oh, and making a few bucks too.

What do I get to control?

Pretty well everything. You decide which portions of your site carry advertising, and the form that advertising can take. Once we're up and running you can see which adverts are scheduled to run on your site, you will be informed via email when a new advert is provisioned and can reject any you don't like. With no questions asked.

There's no setup fee, and no commitment to enter into. If you don't like it, just take it off.

How much can I expect to make?

Honestly, I have no idea. Forums vary widely in their numbers of unique users, hits, and the attractiveness of the subject matter for advertisers. This is why Atomic Droplet is, at it's heart, an auction facility - we let the market decide. And, clearly, as your forum grows, and the demand for advertising increases, so will your revenues. That being said, my initial aim is for a forum of around 1 million hits/month to be able to cover it's hosting costs - say around $200/month.

Regarding revenue 'split', fully 70% of revenues are passed straight to you. This, in an industry where 60% is considered good, 50% is common, and where the market leaders (Google) won't even admit what percentage they take.

How painful is the setup? Will it crash my server?

Between ten minutes and an hour or so (depending on how you've got your templates set up); and no, it won't ... there are no mods, no database alterations, and no additional processor load or bandwidth on your side. We are able to provide a pre-modified subSilver for phpBB2 (provided as a zip of the files), a pre-modified default style for vBulletin (provided as an importable xml). Users of other forums or those with heavily modified styles are recommended to read the guide to Atomic Droplet integration from scratch. It's not nearly as hard as is sounds.

What kinds of ads can I carry?

Atomic Droplet is set up to deal with three standard types of advertising media:

  • A 'wide & thin' text advert where [text in square brackets] becomes a link. Usually this would be across the top of the main table that makes up forum listings, thread listings and the threads themselves. Including one of these is pretty much the bare minimum for using Atomic Droplet.
  • An IAB 'leaderboard' - a 728x90 banner usually but no necessarily included at the head of every page. These are very common and in demand from advertisers but does mean replacing any similar size banner you have already. You can, however, put the default phpBB size logo (200x91) and a banner on the same forum with no problem.
  • An IAB 'medium rectangle' - a 300x250 rectangle popular on editorial pages. Again, in demand from advertisers but fairly rare in forums.

On the signup form below, please let me know which types you want to carry and where on the site they will be hosted.

How do I go about getting paid?

Atomic Droplet calculates your payment at the end of a client's advertising campaign and this is then paid into your Atomic Droplet account. You can see your payments, the campaigns that were run, the number of impressions served and price per thousand impressions from your "my account" page once logged in. Balances over $50 will be paid to your PayPal account on the first of the month.

How do I sign up?

Currently I'm looking for sites of around 100k to 5M hits/month. There are also not currently accounting procedures in place to pay GST registered New Zealand companies, although individuals are no problem (it's still liable for income tax though, sorry).

So, if you want to sign up, please fill in the form below while logged in and I'll use that to set things up and get back to you. Or for more general enquiries, feel free to email me on the address below.

Thanks, Dave
(davep@atomicdroplet.com)

Please log in or register to fill in the application form.