Goal and Mission

To provide free promotional information and services to small businesses and personal website owners. 

History

The original project of our organization was to organize advertisers and banners for a group of web pages that we administered. We had approximately a half dozen advertisers of multiple sizes, quantities and types spread across 6 websites. It became very difficult to add and remove banners from certain pages and change the code when advertising campaigns came to an end. 

We developed an in-house solution based off of a PERL script to do some random banner cycling through the sites. This cut down a significant amount on the maintenance of every page with respect to adding and editing the code all the time. This satisfied our needs for a while but didn't offer any targeting and the reporting was very minimal. It became obvious that another solution was needed. 

We realized that without much money there was no way to purchase or get anyone to develop some software to suit our needs. The advertising and things that we had paid us just enough to keep our websites running and funding the Internet providers. None of us drew any salary. 

The Adswap Network was founded in the spring of 1999 as a project to organize banners and help promote our site through several other sites without a huge advertising budget. The site was developed around a program developed by Darryl Burgdorf, Webadverts (webadverts home). The total start-up cost was roughly $80 after registering software, the domain (Adswap.net), and hosting fees.

We did no external advertising for this site but all persons that signed up found out about us from visiting one of our sites and seeing the little advertisement at the bottom of all the banners. We wanted a place where we could get relatively free external advertising for our websites by offering a free service to others. This was based off the Link Exchange program that Microsoft was already using. But we didn't want the same structure as Microsoft and certainly didn't want to be so large that it was difficult to manage all of the sites.

We signed on several people everyday and soon had over 500 websites participating in the program. They didn't have a significant amount of traffic (~25,000 impressions/day), but all of the sites were working together to advertise one another's' banners and help one another out. This kind of traffic bothered out internet provider, and thy cut off the site on several occasions because the so-called unlimited bandwidth, wasn't in fact unlimited and all of the traffic caused a bit of stress to the inadequate servers they had setup for our accounts. 

The setup made us a bit of money so that we could purchase additional programs and equipment for our websites. In the Fall of '99 after having switched ISPs a couple of times we decided that it was time to purchase our own server and co-locate it somewhere. We decided on a Cobalt Raq3 from Sun Microsystems. The server offered plenty of disk space and the ability for us to add 300 websites to one server without incurring extra fees from a web provider. All we had to pay for was the rack space and bandwidth.  

In the Fall of 2000, after upgrading several times, we had simply outgrown the webadverts software. In the January of 2001 we purchased some very high end banner software called Adcenter 2000 from a company in Europe. We have customized it quite bit and are tweaking it every day to make it easier to navigate and provide statistics to all of our members. We hope not to out grow this solution for quite a while. But in the event that we do, We can upgrade Adcenter to whatever size we need when the time comes.