XBIZ captures the thoughts of digital media luminaries in business development as we sought their take of the year 2018.
New business is the lifeblood of any company. And the front-line executives who foster growth for their enterprises are priceless members of the team, second to none.
The following question about the year in review was asked to the nominees of the 2019 XBIZ Exec Awards:
What initiatives created the most business for you this year?
Remi St-Maur
TrafficStars
“2018 has been a year of some big changes in the industry, namely Google’s implementation of the new Ad Standards with its Chrome updates. These changes have led to some big shifts in how publishers and advertisers alike have had to adapt and some of the old, more “misleading” tactics previously used were no longer viable. As was widely published at the time, we had already prepared for these changes with two new, Google-compliant, ad formats: native ads and video pre-roll. These new ad formats have definitely created the most business for us this year, as they’re safe and risk-free for publishers and generate strong revenues. For advertisers, they convert extremely well and users are reacting positively to these new, unobtrusive ad formats. As we are looking on to 2019 and learning about further changes in the industry with the coming Chrome 71 update, scheduled for a December 2018 release date, these ad formats continue to provide protection and strong revenues for publishers and advertisers alike. We are confident that the success of these ad formats will continue well into the future.”
Jeff Wilson
Flirt4Free
“Three initiatives really paid off for us: Branding and Relationships, Restructuring, and User Acquisition. We’ve put in a lot of effort to build up our brand in the industry over the last few years, which lead to some great referrals and new relationships this year. We restructured a few teams, including the whole traffic department, which has made us much more scalable and accountable. Lastly, we’ve had a heavy focus on user acquisition metrics that has incrementally helped us grow in ways that were right under our nose. 2018 was a great year for us and our affiliates. We’re hoping to find even more production and insights to make our affiliates even more money in 2019.”
Yuval Kijel
Streamate
“This past year, Streamate saw significant growth in our Black Label cams. It’s now at a point where we can offer it to many companies and we see major success in companies using it. Our Black Label can be seen at Pornhub.com and Porn.com for example. This full cam product integration for high volume traffic sites gives full freedom in design and promotion and we expect it to grow further in 2019.”
Natalie Pannon
MojoHost
“MojoHost has been thriving for a number of reasons, including top-notch hardware, knowledgeable staff, uncompromising infrastructure decisions, intelligent networking, and of course strong relationships with the adult industry. We have been building trust through integrity and outstanding service for many years. Besides a plethora of new partnerships and tripling our tech team, which were both important cornerstones for growth, in 2018 we have brought on board a number of new clients, and many of our existing accounts are growing. We are especially happy to see our clients’ businesses grow as we make changes to accommodate their expanding projects. This was a year of many achievements — offering great rates on domains, increasing default bandwidth allotment and very affordable high-bandwidth offers, unbelievable MojoCDN deals, new email solutions, and most notably, MojoCloud. Already available in its S3-compatible object storage component, MojoCloud has resulted in a ton of new business. Our public cloud computing solution is accepting Beta customers and will be launched to the public in January. In marketing, MojoHost’s “That’s Good Mojo” campaign has rocked the boat in the adult industry this year, and we promise to keep the Good Mojo coming!”
