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Almost sounds like he wants to be John Madden.

We're 25 days into 2010 Song-A-Day and hoo-boy, folks are feeling the immensity of the experience. It's no small feat creating, recording a song a day for a month as you can see from Jonathan Aronson's transformation:

Compared with previous years, the 2010 run has the most songs, the most variety, possibly the most talent and verve too. We've also been able to get the songs onto iTunes which has helped drive up the downloads: we'll have 24k downloads within 25 days and will likely finish the month with more than 30k downloads.

We're in the home-stretch. Keep on keepin' on!

Looks like my run with the Rubicon Project is about to end. They are starting to charge publishers a (laughable) $2000/month fee for using their network. I'd love to make more than $2k/mo over on NetScrap.com, but even with 100k impressions a month it's nowhere near that volume. This likely spells the end of my relationship with Rubicon.

Rubicon's service had a great promise: automatic optimization for the ad campaigns that run on your site. They claimed that they'd be able to run the highest-value ads through this optimization. Their system seemed to perform well for a few months, but like all networks the effective CPM eventually started to peter-out.

My guess is that Rubicon's continual focus on premium (read: large-volume) publishers is really driving this. Do they need to aim high-value ads toward their premium properties? Are the operational costs really catching up with their network? The ads on NetScrap.com make a little dough to cover part of the hosting costs. The returns haven't been that great though, maybe I'll just kill them all.

Rubicon Folks-

I am disappointed to read about these changes in your terms. Your decision to scrape small publishers off of your network by charging fees seems to be directly opposed to your 'power to the publisher' tagline. I hope the premium publishers you pursue will accept and understand this apparent disconnect between your claims and your actions.

Sincerely,
CG

Here's the notification from the Rubicon team:

Dear Customer,

It's been a growth-filled year at the Rubicon Project. We've expanded internationally to several continents, continued enhancing our technology and support offerings and welcomed hundreds of new customers to our developing global family.

Over a year ago, we narrowed our focus to concentrate on the premium publisher segment of the market -- tailoring our products, services and level of support to meet their needs. At that time we ceased taking on new sites that didn't meet minimum impression and managed revenue thresholds, but allowed existing small to mid-sized publisher customers to remain using the platform and services.

Despite great strides in developing and applying patent-pending technologies to the management of display inventory, due to the nature of the industry we operate in, there are a number of key elements that still require considerable amount of staff and resources. Primary among those are the development of new ad network relationships, applying resources to collect and consolidate stats from disparate ad networks, billing, responding to and resolving publisher inquires and managing a high level of overall ad quality. As we always strive to give the best to everyone we work with, we've continued to service small and mid-sized publishers, some running 25,000-100,000 impressions a month just as we do premium publishers running 50 million a month. The costs have really begun to add up and we've come to the realization that this simply isn't scalable given our existing basic fee structure.

Beginning January 1st, in order for publishers to continue to be able to access our technology platform and associated support services, we are instituting a requirement for a monthly minimum fee of $2,000, below which a publisher will have to make up the difference. By means of example, if your fee on managed revenue ends up being only $500 a month, you will be responsible for the additional $1,500 to make up for the costs associated with managing and supporting our, and your, business. We recognize these minimums are not going to work for all publishers. If you choose to pass on the new monthly minimum and close your account, we hope you will continue to keep us in mind as your traffic grows and it makes more economical sense for you.

One thing to consider when making your decision on how you would like to proceed, is how your traffic is currently allocated and whether you are serving all your Ad Networks through the Rubicon platform vs. outside of it. This additional traffic might help you meet the minimum monthly fee, while at the same time providing additional lift for your overall inventory.

If you would like to continue to access the Rubicon Project's technology and services, please let us know no later than December 18th by responding to globalsupport@rubiconproject.com Best Regards, the Rubicon Project

This email was sent to: *@netscrap.com*

This email was sent by: the Rubicon Project 1925 S Bundy Drive Los Angeles, CA 90025 USA

John Allspaw put together some great slides about his experiences in an organization where Ops and Engineering work well together. John describes a dream environment -- flashes of which I experienced during peak periods of fun at Kodak and Meez, but never became as institutionalized as it seems to be at Flickr.

Here are the slides from his talk: "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr" (video of the whole talk is coming soon):

More Velocity Conf action on Twitter. Some good stuff going on there! Worth checking out John Adams' talk about scaling Twitter too.

More vids and docs on the O'Reilly site.

We did it. Congrats to everyone who put their songs onto the site. Thanks for all your hard work; I had a great time listening to all of your songs.

I got about 28 songs up there, a few are even keepers. Of my stuff, I feel good about these:

• 2/03: Istanbul
• 2/06: Put Down That Bag Of Rocks
• 2/17: Up In The Attic
• 2/19: Special Sauce
• 2/25: Put A Burrito In Your Mouth

This URL will take you to all my songs.

This player has everything that was uploaded. Steal the embed code if you want this on your site.

Here are some of the most listened-to songs from the month: 247 0203_bruce_2nd_time.mp3
196 0204_bruce_3rdwave.mp3
192 0201_derek_a_song_a_day.mp3
190 0205_bruce_shouldabeenalespaul_.mp3
176 0201_greacen_oh_hell_oh.mp3
173 0203_greacen_istanbul.mp3
163 0202_derek_jury_duty.mp3
163 0202_bruce_timesup.mp3
160 0204_greacen_trouble_sleeping.mp3
159 0215_bruce_base.mp3
158 0203_derek_where_is_walt.mp3
158 0201_peter_all_that_i_can_feel.mp3
157 0206_bruce_thank_you.mp3
152 0204_bruce_whatthe.mp3
149 0202_greacen_2wo.mp3
147 0204_derek_disneyland.mp3
146 0203_ryan_in_to_the_night.mp3
146 0201_seth_the_best_place_in_the_world.mp3
145 0131_seth_the_day_before_song.mp3
143 0209_greacen_master_of_the_mall.mp3
142 0203_peter_twothreeohnine.mp3
140 0213_derek_hawaii.mp3
140 0205_greacen_bring_it_back.mp3
139 0216_greacen_watching_all_the_good_ones_go.mp3
139 0202_peter_all_of_them.mp3
136 0212_bruce_alone.mp3
132 0208_greacen_wafflepalooza.mp3
129 0212_derek_taxonomy.mp3


Pretty evenly distributed. I remember Bruce's stuff got a lot of attention last year too, but it seems like the earlier songs are still getting plenty of play. \

We're almost to 13000 song streams at this point and if the traffic followed last year's pattern, people will still be listening for a few more days.

Starting to think about Song-A-Week for the rest of the year. Email me if you want in on this.