The history of Adverticum AdServer's development

While Prím Online in itself gave the developers a lot of work, the fast changing trends of online advertising creatives required a number of experts to work full-time on the modifying and perfecting of AdServer, while the constant commitment of resources (projecting the costs onto a single site) became less and less profitable. The question arose: outsourcing or ASP? In other words: should this be an external service that we rent from others, or should we spend even more on it and rent it out ourselves to others, that is, should we start an application service with AdServer?

The final decision was reached in 2000, when the structure of the Adverticum AdServer service began to take shape, its capabilities were formed (its so-called "feature list"), and increasing numbers of prominent portals became ASP clients. A significant jump in the constant growth curve of turnover was caused by the fact that from September 2003, Origo threaded Adverticum AdServer into all its pages - although growth was not determined purely by this one partner, but by the sum total of users. 2005 was another dynamic year in the history of Adverticum AdServer; in October, weekday turnover reached a daily adview total of one hundred million placements.

2006 was once again a year of great surges. From mid-2005 to mid-2006 (the space of one year) turnover doubled, then tripled in the second half of 2006 (in just six months!). In this way, Adverticum was able to start 2007 with ten billion adviews placed monthly.

We didn’t learn what an ad placement programme needs to know based solely on the so-called “feature-list" of renowned AdServers, but on our own experiences, as our company was continuously operating the best-known informatics portal. (At the establishment of Hungary’s online advertising market, when it was primarily informatics companies that thought about online marketing, Prim Online was there among the top five, most sought after online media.)

Besides the large portals (Origo, Startlap, online versions of traditional media: printed press, radio, tv) increasing numbers of small and mid-sized websites also utilised the AdServer-ASP, which did not have its own ad management team and therefore, happily brought its pages and advertising capacity into a common advertising medium - Adnetwork. An independent company, Adnetwork Kft. (Ltd.), was established in May 2004, for the organisation and sales of Adnetwork. Then from May 2006, the operation of Adnetwork was taken on by T-Online, which, besides sales of its own pages, began “sales house" activities. As part of a long-term cooperation contract, Adverticum was charged with ad placement for both AdNetwork members and for other T-Online partners in the context of the sales house.