Banners, Buttons and Additional Advertising Units

Homepage Mini Banner (only)
Banner can be purchased to run on the About homepage, exposing your message to all users that visit the front page.

RON
Advertising will rotate throughout the entire About network, providing you with mass impressions.

Channel Rotation
Our channels help users find the sites they want and create the ultimate destination for any specific topic or interest. They are divided into 23 categories and you can choose to buy as many channels as you wish:

Arts & Literature Autos CitySearch Cities/Towns Computing & Technology Education Food & Drink Health & Fitness History

Hobbies & Games House & Home Homework Help Industry & Business Jobs & Careers Money News & Issues Parenting & Family

People & Relationships Religion & Spirituality Shopping & Style Small Business Sports & Recreation Teens Travel

Targeted GuideSites
About Guide sites enhance your ability to reach any targeted audience with unparalleled depth of content. About Guides identify a handful of sites that are relevant to their specific subjects. When you place advertising on a Guide site, you also automatically reach these additional targeted, high-quality sites.

Advertising Units

Banners and Buttons
These units can be purchased to run across the About Network. About adheres to the Internet Advertising Bureau and CASIE standards. About accepts GIFs, JPEG files, Rich Media (prior approval required) and third-party redirects. About uses Doubleclick DART (Dynamic Advertising Reporting & Targeting) to serve all ad banners and buttons. All clients receive usernames and passwords to access real-time reporting.

Banners

Full Banners
Dimensions: 468x60 pixels
File Size:12k max.
Rotation: unlimited
Location: Top and bottom of the page
Purpose: Branding and clicks
Targetability: 100% targetable, across Guidesites and Channels as well

Tower Banners
Dimensions: 120x600 pixels
File Size:15k max.
Rotation: unlimited
Location: Side bar banner
Purpose: Branding and clicks
Targetability: 100% targetable by keyword or placement across network

Billboard Banners
Units can be purchased to run on the About channels, exposing your message by owning a block of real estate on the channel homepages
Dimensions: 336x260 pixels
File Size:20k max.
Rotation: 4 loops
Location: Block on side of page
Purpose: Branding and clicks
Targetability: 100% targetable across Channels

Buttons

Square Button
Dimensions: 125x125 pixels
File Size:7k max.
Rotation: 4 loops
Location: Mid-right hand navigation bar
Purpose: Branding and clicks
Targetability: 100% targetable across Guidesites and Channels

Newsletter Sponsorships
About's editors aggregate our Guide's content and send out topic-specific newsletters reaching over 1,300,000 subscribers. Some examples are:

	About Autos		About Health
	About Cribnotes		About Sports & Recreation
	About Cyber World		About Teen Life
	About Education		About this Week
	About Entertainment		About Today
	About Food & Drink		About Travel

Audio Newsletters
Client purchases ability to play their audio clip in the background of our About Direct Newsletters.

About Direct Newsletters

Solo-Emails
Target opt-in consumers by demographics or interest through an email that features an exclusive advertiser. The following properties and brands are included: About Extras, BargainDog, Freeservers/50Megs, Gane, and Sweepstakes/Winvite

Shared-Emails
Cost-effectively reach the masses with an advertisement in a weekly direct marketing publication sent with three other advertisements from select clients to an entire database of subscribers. The following brand is included: BargainDog

Checkboxes
Collect a user's name, email, HTML/text or address information when they check a box indicating an interest in an advertiser's offer. The following properties and brands are included: About, BargainDog and Freeservers/50Megs

Popunders/Popovers
Advertisements in a smaller browser window that loads over or under the original content page.
Dimensions: 250x250, 640x480
File size: 20k max

“Did you Know”
A fact of the day created by the guide and found on the mainpage of the guidesite is available for sponsorship.

Logo Sponsorship
An ad unit that can be purchased as a means of branding and available when there is no partnership on the site. It is a static banner that is located right below the title bar on the upper right hand corner of the site.

Partnership Boxes
A space set aside in the Guidesite and Channel pages that offers a partner's content, tools, and/or functionality that complement the relevant channel or guidesite. This is an out of the box opportunity for those looking for an advertising vehicle that is interactive and beyond the banner.

Minisite
A customized site for advertisers within the About network that can either mirror the advertiser's site or have a completely customized look and feel. It serves as a multimedia showcase for the advertiser's brand, products, or promotions. Because the site is integrated within the About taxonomy, advertisers are able to reach a targeted audience.

Auto Buying Site
The autobuying site provides research tools and/or functionalities that enhance the experience for potential auto buyers. The site complements the About taxonomy by dedicating an expert to the site, yet limits the content in offering trends, consumer tips and top picks to fully maximize the consumer experience.

Sprinks
Sprinks is an online performance-based marketing vehicle designed to offer small and large businesses a way to reach their target audience. As an inexpensive and effective marketing tool, Sprinks friction-free platform enables marketers to bid for both placement in keyword search results and for presence on content-rich sites. The advertiser determines and controls the price (the higher the bid the higher the ad placement.) Sprinks listings appear not only in search results on http://sprinks.about.com but in contextually relevant placements on hundreds of high quality sites across the Web.

BoutCast
A videoplayer that plays a 15-30 second advertisement which appears in a targeted popup and has the capability of being targeted at the Channel and Guidesite level. There are two components, the video and the 120 x 60 banner that is sold as a sponsorship of the video. Clicks on BoutCast cannot be tracked, and there is a 10 business day lead time.

Targeting
Dynamically targeted criteria, including keyword, geographic location, day part, browser, operating system, ISP, and OSP. Such examples consist of Sprinks, skyscrapers and 468 x 60 banners.

Content Specials
Specials are developed on a seasonal and holiday basis, creating topic-specific environments combining advertising tools, products and services with related Guide content. Content specials are promoted heavily both on About and other targeted sites.

	Holiday Shopping		Summer Travel
	Mother's Day		Father's Day
	Back to School		Small Business

Brand Awareness Studies
About will partner with Dynamic Logic Inc., a leading online research company to quantify the attitudinal impact of your online ad campaign on About.com. Our goal is to measure those ad impressions that never get clicked by a user. This is not a call to action campaign.

We will help you answer important advertising questions:

• Brand awareness: Is the campaign raising awareness of the brand?
• Message Association: Is the campaign helping position the brand with the right message or tagline?
• Purchase Intent: Is the campaign increasing purchasing interest?
• Message Recall: Do people remember the ad and what do they think of it?
• Actual Product Purchase: How many respondents actually purchased your product?
• Creative Evaluation: Do people respond positively or negatively to your creative?

About's Branding Package:
Our branding package offers you an effective brand effectiveness study, based on statistically proven pre-post test methodology.

• We will compare and contrast attitudinal impact of your campaign on different demographic profiles (such as age, gender, and income) and frequency of exposure.
• Measure effectiveness of the campaign on your target demographic.
• Measure effectiveness of multiple ad units, such as banners, sponsorships, and brandsites*.
• Quantify actual product purchase*.
• About's researchers will analyze the results and provide strategic recommendations.
• About's researchers will also provide you with a campaign Report Card.

How does it work?We plug in our research tool into your online ad campaign to measure the effectiveness of all impressions in real timeCompare responses on established brand metrics among visitors who have been exposed to your campaign vs visitors who have not been exposed to your campaign.

Interactive Media

Ad4Ever
The TopLayer^TM platform's transparent-layer capabilities provide a non-intrusive, yet highly effective marketing vehicle for building strong relationships with the consumers, making it a highly efficient tool for advertisers and marketers.

Unicast Superstitials
Super-rich popup product that has flash and streaming video. It uses a polite download technology so users have to go to several (average of five) pages before ad plays.

Shoshkeles
Shoshkeles is free moving animation with sound and has a universal reach. Shoshkeles is unique among DHTML formats in that the Shoshkeles code is uniform for all campaigns on About. Using a DART macro, the code is modified dynamically identifying location within the About network. United Virtualities creates Shoshkeles creative for advertiser/agency.

Eyeblaster
Eyeblaster is a Rich Media Ad Management System that can serve a variety of rich media formats, including floating ads, DHTML, interstitials, streaming media, wallpaper ads, and full-screen commercials. The content is a combination of streaming video and Flash animation. Advertisers/Agencies typically send creative in Flash format to Eyeblaster where Eyeblaster ad is created.

Eyewonder
Eyewonder is a rich media technology that allows the serving of high-quality, video ads into existing ad slots without requiring the user to have a media player.Eyewonder's EyeMedia creates a seamless experience for the end user that requires no player or download to deliver a video and audio "commercial" with a powerful TV-like video impression. It is built in Java, allowing any user from a 28k dialup to T1, to view video and audio without needing to download a player or executable. The video loads as the page loads and immediately delivers the ad message.

Point*Roll
Point*Roll is a DHTML-based expandable banner technology. Point*Roll can be used in any standard ad slot and allows seamless expansion of creative upon mouse-over by the user. Point*Roll's proprietary technology allows detailed in-banner data capture capabilities including ecommerce transactions and email collection. Point*Roll focuses on reaching the user in-session, without redirecting them from their current browsing session. Advertisers work with Point*Roll to design creative which is then provided to About.com for trafficking.