This post was exclusively written for Bandwidth Blog by Ad Dynamo CEO – Sean Riley
Ad Dynamo has made great strides since launching in March 2009. We have taken the approach of getting it right in South Africa, and then leveraging this successful model in global markets. South Africa, as many Internet entrepreneurs will know, is a relatively small market when compared to established geographies such as European countries or the US. This makes it harder for local start ups as the market is small and to launch a profitable business you have to truly dominate. The upside, is that if you get it right in SA you will most likely succeed in larger markets.
The downside is that many great SA start ups do not succeed but would have in a bigger market. We believe that Ad Dynamo has successfully established itself as a clear alternative in the contextual advertising marketplace in South Africa and are now looking to use our local success as a launch platform in other markets.
Over the past year we have achieved consistent growth of our publisher base, traction amongst most of the advertising agencies, and as a result, recognition as an important role player in the ad delivery industry. We have made significant investments into our technology and believe we have sufficient infrastructure to grow without re-investment into hardware for the next 2 years. We are currently streamlining many business processes ““ April saw the first complete automation of payments to over 1,000 publishers. Personal customer service remains a big driver and differentiator for us and whilst this may not always be possible we are trying our best to provide this at all times.
Our international expansion beings in the UK, where we have already had a big victory by becoming the first internationally certified Microsoft vendor to stream rich media interactive Silverlight ads. You can view the example of what we did for Mass Effect 2 here.
This ad was served 28 Million times on MSN.co.uk & this include 16 Million ads served in a single day ““ the bandwidth consumed was pretty mind boggling. For obvious local restrictions, we had to serve the ads from our UK servers. Silverlight intelligent streams video at the best available quality, with the best available quality of this particular ad being 600Mb! The bandwidth usage of our UK environment was 1Gb / second for an entire 24 hour window ““ pretty amazing!
As with many start ups, business models adapt, and due to the the Silverlight success we are currently establishing a focused division that will stream rich media advertising.
Ad Dynamo now supports advertising and publishing of our ads in any country worldwide. We support transactions in USD, EURO, RAND, & GPB. Other developments on the horizon include multi-language support, PayPal support (for paying and receiving payments), mobile advertising, and the setup of our UK team. We are bullish about our the international market, but our roots are firmly planted in SA, and our operational capacity will be based here, and revenues are repatriated each month back to SA.
What has been fantastic is the support we have seen in South Africa from all corners. In my many years in the Internet I can say that the industry has not always been as supportive ““ over the past few years there has been a move to co-operation, co-opetition, and a more mature view towards how businesses can work together to mutually benefit. South Africa is a hub of innovation and we have what it takes to take on the best in the world.
