Selling ads online isn’t easy and unless you have a site with a large audience, chances are the major advertising networks aren’t interested in working with you. Direct ad sales are often an attractive option for smaller blogs and online publications, but managing them can be a major hassle. Skyscrpr, a new startup launching out of Vancouver’s GrowLab accelerator today, wants to make direct ad sales easy for publishers. As the company’s co-founder Paul Burger told me yesterday, SkyScrpr wants to take the hassle out of direct ad sales and let publishers focus on creating content. The service offers a very well designed and easy to use drag-and-drop interface to set up ad units on your site.
SkyScrpr is targeting everything from smaller personal sites with 50,000 pageviews per month to mid-tier sites with 5 million pageviews. The service handles the complete workflow from getting the ads set up to handling payments after the deal is done. There are, of course, other direct ad sales solutions available for bloggers and small online publishers, including iSocket and BuySellAds. For the most part, their features are comparable, but SkyScrpr doesn’t currently focus as much on marketing its publishers’ inventory as much as BuySellAds does, for example.
In return, SkyScrpr offers a beautiful interface that makes managing and tracking ad campaigns easier than any other tool out there and, as Burger told me, he and his co-founder Jacob Reiff are working on adding more marketing solutions for publishers. Unlike other solutions, SkyScrpr also doesn’t have any minimum pageview requirements for sites that want to implement it.
As Burger told me earlier this week, the service is currently available for free and the team is still working out the details of how to best monetize the service. Chances are, SkyScrpr will take a cut from all ad sales generated through its site, but the team seems open to experimenting with other solutions as well.
The team is currently in the process of raising a funding round, but because the negotiations are still ongoing, Burger wasn’t able to reveal any details just yet.
