How AdPushup enabled effective Ad monetization and quality content for The Hacker News

Goals & Challenges

Offering quality content and information

As a seasoned player in the tech space, Hacker News always wanted to offer quality technology content and updates to its audience.
While the initial idea of launching this platform started as blogging, the vision was always about delivering value and a good experience to website visitors. With the passage of time, ideas of trying new ways and approaches to achieve greater business output gradually evolved.

Exploring new technology and capabilities

With the AdTech space evolving at a rapid pace and several publishers and bloggers looking at new capabilities for better business
outcomes, The Hacker News team wanted to explore Header Bidding which was quite a buzzword in the ad monetization world. And like THN, there were several other bloggers too who were trying it out.

However, effectively implementing new technological capabilities, requires expertise, skills, and the right kind of support. That’s where
the team felt the need to collaborate with a monetization partner, and scale things up for improved experience and financial outcomes.

Difficulties with AdSense

While AdSense initially was useful to start with, offering decent revenue and useful features, certain aspects of AdSense ended up causing problems for the team. Instances such as blogging websites getting banned 8 to 10 times without any appropriate assistance or resolution, was one such. And getting a new account on AdSense was never an easy task. In addition, the fact that AdSense revenue increases only on the basis of traffic attracted through fresh content posted as frequently as daily, was not something that was suiting the team’s need. And despite high traffic on certain days irrespective of content freshness, AdSense revenue would continue to remain stagnant. It was clear that this revenue over which Google had control, would not have much likelihood of significant improvement.

Limitations of other partners

The team had tried leveraging certain ad networks and partners, however, the quality of ads being offered was not up to the mark resulting in a negative impact to the reputation of the website and User Experience. The ads were not contextual; meaning, the ads offered were not in alignment with the website content. In addition, the access to rich advertisers and the eventual ad-serving output were not as per expectation.

Such challenges further solidified the need to join hands with a monetization partner that would help with ad monetization plans without any damage to website content quality or User Experience. The team had made it clear that their fundamental goal was to offer quality tech content to users and the ad partner would simultaneously help with ad website monetization.