Remember Adonomics (formerly Appaholic), the fishy analytics directory website for Facebook applications that we uncovered was used to pimp a service (the UADA, dead and buried now) from the same people who backed them (Altura Ventures), by ranking them as the biggest Facebook app creator before they ever launched? Well, we sure do.
According to AllFacebook, Adonomics has now been acquired by Adknowledge, which has made acquisitions in this space before (social ad network Cubics in December 2007). We have a feeling this was a very small deal, given the fact that Google Trends shows zero traffic for Adonomics since last April. (Update: Quantcast shows different stats, with rapidly increasing traffic numbers over the course of the Summer and a sharp decline right after. Alexa shows stagnation from April until now).
Lee Lorenzen, who runs Altura Ventures and was interim CEO for The UDUA back in the good old days, is notorious for making wild claims about the valuation of Facebook apps, and dreaming of a big seed investment round from aspiring Facebook app developers. We have an e-mail in with him to see how much Adknowledge valued Adonomics for.
The UADA was a joke. Nobody ever signed up and it collapsed before it even launched.
Lee really hurt Adonomics’ standing by pushing that crap.
And the creator and lead developer, Jesse, hasn’t been working there since early this year.
Contrary to the referenced Google Trends report, which is obviously flawed, Alexa shows Adonomics traffic actually up over the last 12 months: http://www.alex...s/adonomics.com
Adonomics is the only online public resource that tracks and reports on the number of people using facebook applications daily. Adknowledge plans to expand the current Adonomics offerings and continue the Adonomics tradition of providing public reporting and information on trends in the space.
Another point of interest with regards to adonomics.com traffic is quantcast: http://www.quan...m/adonomics.com
Actually Google Trends is the safer bet if you’re trying to measure actual traffic to a website. Companies like SocialMedia, RockYou, and Adonomics have boosted score on Alexa/Compete/Quantcast because they run programs that require participants to include an iframe that leads to one of their subdomains, or primary domain directly on their pages.
For example, track socialmedia.com and slide.com and you’ll notice socialmedia.com actually surpassing slide.com on Alexa/Compete/Quantcast. Don’t be fooled into thinking that SocialMedia has more publishers than Slide has users (it would be impressive for SocialMedia to have more than 20 million facebook developers onboard!). Rather, SocialMedia’s hits are boosted from the iframe pixel included on their publishers’ pages. Compare socialmedia.com and slide.com on Google Trends, however, and the results are far more believable.
In the case of Adonomics, they run an “ad optimization” service, which is more or less just them adding an extra middle man between a publisher and the advertising networks (like SocialMedia, Cubics, and RockYou) which requires the publisher to place an iframe pixel that leads back to the adonomics.com domain. This effectively artificially boosts Adonomics’ rankings on Alexa/Compete/Quantcast to that of whatever publishers they work with.
Once again, refer back to Google Trends and you’ll see that traffic direct to their website (and not through an iframe pixel) has indeed dropped to 0.
Dwayne – actually developeranalytics.com does a better job.
Speaking from experience, Adknowledge’s Cubics is the worst Facebook-oriented ad network in existence. I sure hope they don’t take Adonomics down the drain with them when they go out of business next year.
I think Dwayne must be Dwayne Lafluer the guy who created Cubics and is now the GM of the company. It is always fasinates me how these guys will hide behind stats and pretty words but won’t even address the negative comments people say. Personally I would want to know why a company didn’t have a good experience if I was him but maybe he is just here adding pretty spam and doesn’t really care about some disatisfied user.
It amazes me that cubics is still in business. I had a terrible experience with them, and stick with more reliable networks like Rawclix.
It was funny to here Lee claim astronomical, GDP-defying valuations for Facebook and Facebook apps. Most interesting was watching self-appointed “social media gurus” glomming onto his outlandish predictions and valuations thinking they could get rich off the hype. No doubt Facebook is very valuable – but Lee’s predictions put Facebook in the league of Microsoft and Google.
We knew it was a joke when he asked us for $10k USD to put a 125×125 button ad on his site (with the other 8-10 ads already there)
per month!
While the valuations that were previously on Adonomics left much to be desired, and I’m not sure anyone still has a good idea of what each application is worth, Adknowledge see Adonomics as a way to build a community, provide information and further engage in the social community.
Adknowledge plans to improve and expand the current Adonomics offerings, providing more insight into industry trends, not just on Facebook, but across all of the major social networks. Combining the Adonomics platform with data collected through Cubics.com, which now serves an estimated 40% of all ads on Facebook applications, at 10 billion impressions per month, will undoubtedly create a useful resource for developers, news media and others in the industry.
40%?
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
Compete says otherwise… along the lines of 10%.
Arguably it’s possible Cubics may hold a whole lot of non-US traffic, although unless you have 90%+ of the UK demographic, it’s probably low-monetizing, non-english speaking users.
We found adanomics data to be a spotty, so we created a way to track app usage ourselves inside Facebook: http://apps.fac...dir/popular.php
It doesn’t bother with valuation since that’s dependent on many more factors than just total installs or DAU.
If you don’t see your app there, feel free to add it. If you want to see us track data in different ways or to see more data, please send us feedback and we’ll improve it.
The 40% number comes from the number of impressions that Cubics.com serves compared to the number that are estimated to be served on all Facebook applications. Cubics serves around 10 billion impressions per month in the space, mostly in the US, UK, Canada & Australia. With regards to the question of international presence, Adknowledge has four U.S. offices: Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco & New York as well as offices overseas in London & Sydney. These international offices connect Cubics.com with brand advertisers in those areas which provides Cubics with a deep international advertiser base.
If you Google “Adonomics,” the website itself isn’t even in the first page of results. The first result is an entry on Jesse’s blog.
Everyone in the Facebook dev community stopped paying attention to Adonomics once he left in April. The site hasn’t changed one bit since then, either.
That 40% number is total BS. By your impression numbers my app serves over 1% of Facebook apps’ total pageviews. Not likely.
I don’t know of a single serious publisher who still uses Cubics as their primary ad network.
Adknowledge Cubics.com is proud to work with many top Facebook, MySpace, & Bebo applications. Some top Facebook applications that Cubics works with are: We’re Related, WereWolves, Owned, Are You Interested, etc
We are very excited to see the response surrounding Adonomics joining Adknowledge and are especially thankful to those that have contacted us with ideas on how we can improve the Adonomics offering — we plan to start improving and integrating the Adonomics offerings in the very near term. Be sure to visit us at http://adonomics.com and http://cubics.com
I think that Facebook should create a debit card program where people can buy stuff directly from their advertisers. Especially if they are seeking to become a major portal, most people use the web for shopping these days, or information stalking and scrabble games.
Lee really hurt his reputation.
Adonomics stalled after April because that’s when its founder, Jesse Farmer, left. Lee sold it to AdKnowledge in November, and they let it go to shit.