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Lijit Blog

Lijit’s Holiday Wish ListDecember 23 2008

You would think, that with all the good things happening here at Lijit, we couldn’t want for anything more. While basically true (we’re healthy, have funding, and mostly like one another), there’s always room for dreaming. And after asking around the office, it turns out there a few things that Lijit wants for Christmas. File these under “publishers we want to be using our search” and enjoy the list!

Design*Sponge features the absolute best in home and product design, including product reviews, new designer profiles, trend forecasting, student design and global design shows. Lijit could help Design*Sponge by searching everything they’re doing so wonderfully on the web: their press and accolades, their Flickr photos and featured podcasts, each contributor’s content, and their newest video collaboration via YouTube with the New York Public Library. Not to mention, with design in mind, they can use our WordPress plugin and not change their current blog design and layout.

Don’t you want to be Lijit?December 17 2008

Despite what everyone else seems to be doing, we’re hiring! Lijit has experienced incredible growth over 2008 and we are now in need of two crucial people to join our team. Read on if you think you have what it takes to hang with the Lijit crew of superstars.

The first position is what we’re calling a Publisher Support Engineer. This job is unique because there are several technical and communication aspects to it, including product support, collaboration with Software Engineers, publisher troubleshooting and a load of creative problem-solving. You can read all the specifics in our job description. One perk of the job is the fact that you get to work very closely with this guy, who is much funnier than he looks here…

And the second position we’re looking to fill is an Advertising Sales Catalyst. This person will be responsible for evangelizing our ad network, building strong relationships with advertisers, and assisting Lijit publishers in selling their ad inventory. In this role, you’ll be able to help establish Lijit as an industry leader in keyword-based search advertisin

Google Alert: Google Alerts BrokenDecember 16 2008

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but in the last month Google Alerts has slowly (and now quickly) deteriorated.

Lately I have been seeing people talk about how Google Blog Search has lost its way, and how it’s now returning links from blog sidebars. Now, just a few minutes ago I got my normal Google Alerts report on “Lijit” and it contained about 50 items, most of which are references to our widget in blog sidebars.

Google must have some new crawler code going that isn’t quite as smart as the prior version. Weird.

Publisher Spotlight: The Wiz of Odds/The March to MadnessDecember 12 2008

This past September, Lijit had the pleasure of attending Blog World and meeting many bloggers who were interested in our widget. One of the nicest guys to stop by our booth was Jay Christensen, who realized our value almost immediately and had lots of questions for us about how to install Lijit on his blogs. With his journalistic background and sharp sense of humor, Jay’s sports blogs (The Wiz of Odds and The March to Madness) do a wonderful job of entertaining and informing.

In addition to bringing his readers news of recent coaching changes, he also covers

Ready…set…price!December 10 2008

I’m Dave Ferro, the Director of Ad Serving here at Lijit Networks, and today’s guest author for the Lijit blog. Today, Lijit is releasing the latest version of its ad network. The theme of this release is to offer greater value and control for our publishers. In our first release, we provided publishers with the ability to opt-in to our ad network and earn money from the largely overlooked ad inventory of search results pages. It was a solid first step in our product evolution, and now we are taking a second step toward our goal of providing publishers with a transparent, flexible, and manageable search ad offering.

Publishers can now set their own pricing for search ads that advertisers target for their search results pages. Publishers who choose to do so can also sell their own search ad inventory through a link that they can email to advertisers. Because many publishers will prefer the leave the business of selling ad space to us, we will fill all available inventories with ads that we sell directly to advertisers. As always, we will fill the remaining unsold inventory with ads from third party networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo!.

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