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Advertising

Contents:

Promotional offer
Advertise by location
Worldwide audience!
How much will it cost?
What formats will you accept?
How do I apply?
Links

Promotional Offer

For a limited period £40 of free advertising is being offered while the site is still officially under development. This is equivalent to over 4 months of advertising on the site. What's the catch? Well, none really, but from time to time you may be asked for comments on how the system is working for you – there is no obligation to continue with paid advertising after your free credits have run out.

You will allowed a daily quota of 30 credits shared between up to two advert campaigns (see below for an explanation of credits and quotas). You must be advertising a music related service and your adverts must fit with the specifications detailed below. If necessary we can create a basic banner advert if you provide the text and images.

To take advantage of this offer send an e-mail to and mention the promotion. We look forward to hearing from you!

Advertise by location

If you place an advert on the site you can opt to give the advert a location and a radius. The advert will then only appear when a user searches within that area. For example, if you place an advert that is based in Cardiff, you could set a radius of 20 miles to show the advert to users as far as Newport, Merthyr Tydfil, Cwmbran and Weston-super-Mare. If you increase the radius to 40 miles you will also reach users of the site as far as Swansea, Bath and Taunton.

Setting a larger radius will reach more people, but clearly your advertising will be less targeted. If you are a local company this is a safe and cost-effective way to reach your audience because you can control who sees your adverts.

Worldwide audience!

You can also place an advert that is not tied to a location. A non location-specific advert can appear when the user doesn't specify a search location, or if there are no adverts local to their area. This is a good option if you want as much publicity as possible, if location is not important to your business, or if you offer your services via the Internet.

How much will it cost?

The short answer is as much or as little as you want.

You buy advertising space by purchasing 'credits' in advance. One credit will buy one advert impression (one view for one user). If your advert links to your own website, one click-through to your site costs four credits. At the moment one credit costs £0.01. If your credit balance reaches zero then your advert won't be shown until you top up the credit balance. We'll send you an e-mail to warn you when your balance is low. There is a minimum price of £5 for buying credits and as an introductory offer we will give you £5 worth of credits for free when you open your account!

So that you can control the amount of money you spend on advertising, you can set a daily quota for the number of impressions that your advert can have. Setting a large quota for your advert will give it more prominence but you will spend more money. Advert viewing is weighted so that if you have a small quota your impressions will be spread throughout the day and don't get used up early on.

Each month we will send you a report showing statistics and a graph of your adverts' activity for the month so you know how each advert is performing (see fig. 1).

fig. 1 An example report

What formats do you accept?

We accept most common advertising formats that are in use on the Internet today:

Macromedia Flash (SWF) files
the GIF image format
PNG image format
JPEG image format

Flash and GIF are suitable for animated adverts. If you just want a static advert (not animated) then the PNG or JPEG image formats may also be suitable. At the moment we support two standard sizes: the full-banner advert which goes across the top of the page (468 by 60 pixels), and the vertical-banner advert which fits down the right-hand side of the page (120 by 240 pixels).

Flash animations must conform to the clickTAG standard to allow tracking of click-throughs (see Tracking Macromedia Flash Movies on the Macromedia website for more information).

Large image files can irritate users by slowing down the loading of the page, so all adverts must be smaller than 20KB. We want adverts to enhance and augment the service this site offers, so we have a policy of only hosting adverts that have relevance to the site and rejecting adverts that employ tricks that annoy users, such as flashing animations or adverts that mimic alert boxes (see more detailed specifications).

How do I apply?

If you want to advertise on this site just send an e-mail to and we will get in touch with you.

You might also want to read more detailed advert specifications, the conditions and the privacy policy.