Nuffnang in The Singapore Straits Times

For those of you who might have missed it, Nuffnang was in the Singapore Straits Times last Sunday.

Here is the text-version of the article.

Buck$ for Blog$

Thanks to Singapore firm Nuffnang, bloggers can turn their popularity into ad dollars
By Jamie Ee Wen Wei
ST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: WANG HUI FEN & TAY CHERN HUI

“BLOGS were once the domain of daily musings, inconsequential chatter and random rantings.
But now, a local company wants to change that by bringing in advertising money for local bloggers.

Founded by Singaporean Cheo Ming Shen and his Malaysian counterpart, Timothy Tiah, Nuffnang provides an online platform to match bloggers with advertisers.

All bloggers need to do is to join its blog advertising community and fill up an online form, which provides details of their blogs and readerships that are used to match them with advertisers.
Launched in Malaysia in February, the blog advertising community - the first of its kind in Asia - was an instant hit, attracting 300 bloggers in just three days.

‘We were only expecting 300 blogs in three months,’ said Mr Cheo, 24, a graduate of the London School of Economics.

Two months later, the company started its Singapore community, and 1,800 bloggers have already joined.

Despite competition from similar online ad services such as Google AdSense, local bloggers are attracted to Nuffnang because it focuses on promoting local products and businesses, which means bloggers have a greater chance of clinching ads on their web space.
‘There is no point showing somebody in Singapore an ad from the US, right? So if you sign up with Google Adsense, the ads appearing will be public service announcements, which pay zero dollars,’ said local blogger Cowboy Caleb, who earned $200 in two weeks from Nike Singapore ads on his blog.

Depending on the number of unique visitors to their blogs, bloggers can earn from $2 to as much as $2,000 a week for ads placed on their blogs.

Big-time bloggers such as Wendy Cheng, also known as Xiaxue, can easily earn about $1,000 a week, said Mr Cheo.

But personal blogs with a smaller readership are benefiting from this service too.
Final-year psychology student Estee Teo, who keeps a personal blog that has up to 150 hits a day, said she earned about $7 a week from ads for Hitchoo.com, a dating website. The money, though meagre, stokes the ego.

‘It feels good that someone actually wants to put their ad on my blog,’ said Ms Teo.
For advertisers, the playing field seems huge.

A study by media agency Universal McCann said that Singapore’s community of bloggers and blog-readers has increased dramatically in the last six months. About 75 per cent of Singapore’s netizens - about 2.5 million people - have read at least one blog in the past six months. By March, 36 per cent of them had blogs of their own.

So far, at least five companies, including Nike Singapore and Hitchoo.com, have run ads on blogs under Nuffnang.

But local advertisers remain conservative. According to a report by Nielsen Media Research, Singapore’s online advertising expenditure accounted for only 2 per cent of the market’s total advertising spending in March this year. The total advertising expenditure was almost $2 billion last year.

Still, Mr Cheo is confident that blog advertising will pick up among advertisers.
‘They have waited a long time for this, and they are very happy to explore this new medium,’ he said.

And there is always the dream of becoming the next big thing on the Internet.
‘Who doesn’t want to be the next Google?’ Mr Cheo said.”

Who won the 3 Days 2 Nights stay at the Grand Hyatt Bali for June’s Lucky Draw?

Sorry it took some time for us to update this guys.

Things have been so busy for us here at Nuffnang it’s unbelievable!

Anyway, without further due, the winner of the 3D 2N stay at Grand Hyatt Bali worth over RM1,750 is an anonymous blogger that chooses to remain anonymous till today.

Mr. Aisehman from http://aisehman.org/ !!!

Dear Aisehman, please do enjoy your trip. Tell us all about it when you do get back.

-Samantha Wong of Nuffnang

Nuffnangers Get To Choose!!!

With the implementation of our new ads syndication system, our Nuffnang ads on blogs have been loading up very quickly and no longer slows down any blogs from loading. It is now designed to ensure that the HTML structure of your blog loads up first before our ad does.

However, that is not the only thing our new system is meant to do. We’ve just made available a new surprise feature that Nuffnangers could all use very effectively.

Weeks ago, we experimented running network-wide CPC ads a few weeks ago but some of our Nuffnangers were not entirely happy with it.

So being a learning company, we temporarily stopped all our CPC campaigns and consulted many bloggers on how we should approach this.

One of our bloggers Freethinker from http://thenewspeculator.blogspot.com gave us a suggestion.

He suggested that we allow bloggers to have an option to opt in or out of CPC campaigns, so that is exactly what we have done with our new ads syndication system.

The Choices We Have Made Available To Nuffnangers

Starting from this coming Sunday (15th July 2007) , all blogs in the Nuffnang Community will receive ads, regardless of their traffic. Some ads will be based on Unique Visitor Count and some on Cost Per Click though priority is always given to Unique Visitor Count ads since they naturally pay more and don’t depend on clicks.

So if there are no Cost Per Unique Visitor ads running on your blog, you will have 3 options.

1) Show CPC ads - Where our network-wide CPC ads will rotate and show on your blog and you will still be paid per click.

2) Minimize Default Ad - This is an option where our default ad will minimize and shrink itself so it does not take up too much space on your blog.

3) Show Default Ad - And for bloggers that still want to display our default ads if there are no ads, you will still have this option.

You can select between these options upon logging into our system and clicking on the “Add Ads” tab.

Nuffnang Ads Occasional Slow Loads: A thing of the past

Dear Nuffnangers,

The past few months since the launch of Nuffnang have flown by so quick it’s hard to believe we’ve come so far in such a short period of time. We have made a lot of good moves in the past months, and we have also made some mistakes, all in which we are gradually rectifying right now.

One of those mistakes is in the optimization of our ads syndication code to make it such that it loads faster. You may not see the changes on the surface, but we have spent the past weeks completely revamping our ads syndication system and it now works as efficiently as anyone can expect it to be.

Our ads are now designed to load after the HTML structure of your blog is loaded, so if our server is overloading or even down, our ads will not slow down any blogs from loading.

For the Nuffnangers who have stuck with us through all this time in spite of our flaws, thank you very much for your support and understanding all this while. It is something that we never dare to take for granted, which is why we are continuously working to improve ourselves.

Please feel free to share any more of your suggestions in improving Nuffnang. Each one of you play a very important part in the growth of Nuffnang as Malaysia’s Blog Advertising Community.

Before I end, just a piece of good news.

We have just received confirmation about a number of very large campaigns from some very Big and Trendy Brands coming up in the coming weeks so if you’d like to be a part of these campaigns, do ensure that your ads are well placed on your blogs.
-Timothy Tiah of Nuffnang

New Nuffnang Help Desk

Nuffnang gets an increasing amount of e-mails each day from bloggers and in spite of having a team member answer your e-mails each day on a full-time basis, it has become increasingly hard for us to keep track of each e-mail.

For that reason, we have recently launched an e-mail support system through our Contact Us page where bloggers will be able to send us help e-mail and on our side, we will be able to track and respond to each ticket efficiently.

This is one of the many improvements that you will see on Nuffnang within the next few weeks.

If you ever need any help from any of us, please feel free to use our Nuffnang Help Desk and we will be responding to your issues quicker and more effectively than ever.

-Timothy Tiah of Nuffnang

Blogger’s Buff 2007

What’s Blogger’s Buff?

Blogger’s Buff is a workshop cum forum happening this Sunday, the 8th of July.

The main objectives are to gather bloggers of different genres together to explore various aspects of blogging and discuss some issues related to the blogging scene.

Why should I go?

If you’re always in the blogging scene or are concern on what’s happening, you should attend this workshop. Moreover, Timothy Tiah from Nuffnang will be giving a talk on how to generate revenue from blogging, all the more reason to attend!

Where and how do I go about?

It’ll be at Dewan Dato’ Haji Sidek, Jln Kg Atap, KL (near Hotel Midah)

If you’re interested, you’d have to register beforehand because the number of seats are limited.

For more information on Blogger’s Buff and how to register, click here!

-Suet Li of Nuffnang