Since then not a week goes by without someone asking us how they can use CrankyAds on a non-wordpress site.

I am pleased to say that now you can.

Over the Easter weekend we rolled out our new CrankyAds Manager, which includes a javascript implementation code.

In simple terms, that means you can copy and paste this code into your website HTML and it will work on any site, no plugin required. It’s the same sort of code Google uses with their AdSense ads.

The code can be placed anywhere on your site and will make that ad zone appear. If you are not familiar with HTML you may need to ask your tech person or designer to place the ad zone code where you want it on your site. You only have to do this once, unless you want to move them in the future.

This new option means a plain HTML site can use CrankyAds, or a site running on Joomla, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, TypePad and of course WordPress still works too. Basically any site where you are allowed to copy and paste code into the design can now use CrankyAds.

The New Manager Interface

In order to facilitate this new option we had to upgrade our manager interface. Previously controlling your ad zone set up was done in the plugin, while approving and cancelling ads was done in the manager.

Now with the new interface, you control everything within the manager. This means you set up your ad zones there, choosing the type of ad, the size, price, duration, etc – everything you used to do in the plugin – and approve and cancel ads too.

We hope this helps to simplify the process of setting up and managing advertisements on your site.

Note for the time being the plugin still functions as it did, duplicating the functions in the manager. The plugin has a couple of extra features, including the ability to place ad zones on your site using WordPress widgets and automatically create an advertise page for you.

For non-wordpress (plugin) users you will see that your advertise here banners click through to the CrankyMart, where your potential sponsors can buy an ad. You can still create an advertise here page on your site but you will have to do it manually and then copy and paste the links to your CrankyMart entry for people to buy ads.

The new manager also has a few more new features as well as a refreshed look. For example you can now delete and add new sites easily, so if you want to use CrankyAds on more than one website, you won’t need to install the plugin on each site and go through the set up process. It’s all handled in the one manager interface.

You may find a few other new features as you dig around in the manager, so make sure you go check it out.

We have another key update to announce, but I will save that for the future.

If you have any feedback, please leave a comment reply to this blog post.

Thanks for using CrankyAds!

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

What this means is that you will now see a notification within your WordPress control panel in the plugins panel whenever a new version of CrankyAds is ready for download. You can download and update the plugin right there with one click, you won’t have to do any manual uploading.

The CrankyAds plugin can now be found within the plugin search in the WordPress control panel too, which hopefully means there will be a whole new bunch of CrankyAd-ers who find us and fall in love with our service.

Can You Do Us A Favour?

Could you please take two minutes now and go to our listing in the directory and leave a rating out of five stars?

Obviously here at team CrankyAds we’d love it if you left a five-star rating, but only if you think our plugin deserves it

This will help us to convince other people that CrankyAds is the best plugin for ad rotation, so your independent vote really counts.

Thank you!

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

P.S. Here is the Yaro.TV daily video that discusses this new feature.

We’re going to be working hard this year to really ramp up what CrankyAds can do for you. We have lots of plans and many new features coming, many of which have been requested from our users like you.

In case you are wondering what goes on behind the scenes, here’s a little blooper reel from a video we put together last year to apply for a startup incubator program.

I hope you’re having as much fun as we are…

Good luck making money with your websites and blogs in 2013!

CrankyAds now requires you charge a minimum of $10 for an ad (or 10 of whatever currency you charge in).

We did this for several reasons -

• If you are charging less than $10 for an ad you should spend more time building up traffic to justify charging more.
• Bloggers tend to under-charge for what their traffic is worth, so this forces you to have a base minimum.
• For us, processing an ad transaction at under $10 is not cost effective if we are managing the transaction for you

If you are not sure how much to charge for advertising, you can read our primer guide here -

How Much Should You Charge For Advertising?

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

What you may not know about Walter is that he is a real adventure junky. His itinerary was packed with helicopter trips, glaciar climbs, quad bike rides through forests and so much more.

Of course before he left for his holiday he was acting as his more sedate alter ego – the programmer – and managed to pump out a few updates to CrankyAds.

Here’s a couple of the changes made. There were a few other small bug fixes made too, but I’ll save you the tiny details.

• Disabled the ability for a user to delete all Active/Pending campaigns on changing zone properties. Users now have to manually cancel all campaigns before they edit a zone’s type or size. This is to protect you from mistakenly deleting campaigns when you change zone details.
• We now log every single campaign status change (Pending/Active/Cancelled). This will come in handy in the future so we can provide you with more detailed history logs.

Going forward, our team have been discussing what feature to work on next. We know a lot of people have asked for a non-wordpress version of CrankyAds so you can use the service on any website.

We are considering starting the development of this feature, however it will likely take a couple of months to complete, during which no other major new development work will be done.

Is there a particular feature you would like to see us prioritize as number one?

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

I’m pleased to announce that Walter has just finished a roll out of new updates to the live CrankyAds service that includes our first statistics update.

It’s a basic update that many people have asked us for, one of many new statistic features we hope to offer in the future. You can now break down the number of impressions and clicks your campaigns receive on a per day basis.

This data is presented in a graph that looks like this –

You can find this data on any of your campaigns as a publisher and an advertiser by logging into the CrankyAds Manager. Once in the manger, go to any campaign, click the more info tab and you will see a summary of your stats. Next to that summary is a link to open up more detailed statistics.

We hope you appreciate this new feature.

More Updates

Along with the statistics update, we also rolled up a couple of new updates, including -

• On each campaign under the payment heading you will now see status notifications that explain when the campaign is due to expire if it has been cancelled, or when it is due to rebill if it’s still active and thus on a payment subscription. This information is presented in the following format: EXPIRES or REBILLS on DATE.
• Advertisers who haven’t paid for their AD will see an UNPAID status message with a Pay Now link underneath

That’s it for this update. Look for new features coming out very soon, and enjoy the statistics.

Yaro
CrankyAds.com

We still want people to be able to use CrankyAds for free, however the time has come where as a company we need to make changes so we can continue to offer our service.

In order to continue to justify putting in the man hours to develop new features, we need to start recouping some costs.

Because of this, from today onwards CrankyAds will take a 25% transaction fee from any ads sold via the service, whether that is on your own advertise here page on your website or blog, or at the CrankyMart.com (previously it was only the CrankyMart).

IMPORTANT: This change will not impact any EXISTING CrankyAds users, only NEW users who sign up from today onwards.

Existing users will have until January 1st 2013 to decide whether to continue to use CrankyAds with the 25% fee, or if you would prefer to look for alternatives. From January, everyone will have the same fee – 25% from any ads sold via our service.

The Good News

This change ensures CrankyAds remains free to download and use. You can manage all your ad campaigns, including text links, video ads and banners, rotate affiliate ads, have Google AdSense run when you have spare ad inventory and keep 100% of any money you make from these methods.

If you sell an ad directly to an advertiser, we will help you by managing the transaction. This means the payment will go to us first, and you can withdraw your 75% share via paypal. You are protected by us and our customer service process for any direct ad buys. Advertisers also go through us for any customer service needs, so you don’t have to handle it.

You can log into your ad manager account and check the payment status on any ad. If it says “paid” then you know the advertiser paid us for the ad, so you can approve it. If you are not sure, just email us – support@crankyads.com – and we can double check for you.

To protect against potential refunds we don’t release any funds until 30 days have past. Check our updated terms of service so you know how the process works regarding withdrawing payments, refunds and approving ads.

Although we understand not everyone will like this change, it is necessary for us to continue as a viable service. We have a lot of features we want to continue to develop for you, including a non-wordpress version of crankyads, detailed statistics, split testing of ads and a better ad management experience. We can only spend the time developing these features for you if we can cover our costs.

Thanks again for your continued support and stay tuned over the coming weeks as new features roll out.

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

The down time happened late here in Australia last night, and we immediately contacted our host to see what was going on.

They said they fixed the problem, but when we woke up this morning, it was still broken, so clearly something wasn’t fixed. They have since restored our services, but we are a bit dubious about what exactly went wrong, so we are looking into it further so this doesn’t happen again.

Since we are pretty upset that the down time lasted as long as it did, we are looking to switch to a better host. We also have some new architecture in the 2.0 version of CrankyAds (coming in our next update) that is designed to ensure that even if our servers are down for extended periods of time, we have back-ups in place, and if the back-ups fail, the service itself will still work, it just won’t update with any new ads until the server is back online.

This is important because obviously we don’t want to bring down any sites using crankyads if our hosting servers go down – even the backups.

From the team at CrankyAds we apologise for any downtime we caused on your website. We are doing our best to make sure this cannot happen again.

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

• Ad buys made via the CrankyMart.com will only show up in your pending list (and send email notifications) once payment have been made. Previously we sent you emails and put ads into your pending list even if payment had not been confirmed yet. Obviously this was confusing, so now if it appears you know money has been received.
• For Ad Buys that you make directly from your website (Not CrankyMart.com purchases) they will always show up as pending in your manager control panel and send out email notification BUT now there will be a “Check PayPal” status indicating that you should check for yourself inside your paypal account to make sure payment was received. If the link is orange we could not get any data on payment, if it is green then there’s a good chance payment was made via paypal, but you should still double check before approving the ad.
• Previously there was a bug if you were using the WPTotalCache plugin at the same time as CrankyAds. Ads were not rotated properly and as a result impressions weren’t delivered evenly. This bug fix ensures that different ads are displayed per page refresh. It does not affect ad zones where all ads are already shown, for example, if you have 3 ads and 3 spots showing every page load, but it does fix the bug if you had 3 ads but only 1 ad showing each pageload.

We will have more updates for you soon!

Yaro Starak
CrankyAds.com

1. You can now choose from three different “advertise here” ads or upload your own advertise here banner, which display when you have unsold ad inventory in any ad zone.
2. You can also add your own custom code to display when you have unsold ads. This can primarily be used to include Google Adsense when you haven’t sold out of direct ad spots.

You can choose to include both these options, or only have Adsense running, or only advertise here ads running, or nothing, in which case if you have no ads sold the space will be blank.

These features were put to the top of our development list after asking our audience what they most wanted to see added to CrankyAds.

It’s pretty clear you want to have more options with how you use CrankyAds when you haven’t sold any ads, or when you have spare ad spots available.

Now you can use CrankyAds to manage not only your direct ad sales, your affiliate ads and internal campaigns, but also Google Adsense, or any other custom code you want to place. This makes CrankyAds a fantastic all-in-one, yet very simple to use advertising management system.

We hope you enjoy these new features and a huge thanks to our development team of Walter and Mick for pumping out these great new options.

Yaro Starak
Chief Cranky
www.crankyads.com