Random Musings
this week we filmed our first video interview for soompi.com. we were granted an interview with the Korean pop sensation BoA. she may not be well known here in the US, but she is an absolute, traffic-jam-causing, stadium-packing, screaming-mobs-at-airports level celebrity in asia. BoA was visiting the US to promote her first english language single, titled eat you up.
we had a few scheduling issues which resulted in us being told the date and time of the interview the day before the interview. and it was scheduled for last night, friday, 10:30 pm in los angeles, koreatown. given that its prime holiday season and 10:30 pm is not typical working hours for anyone, we lost our 2 camera crews we had set up for the interview. and in the mad dash for a crew, ever resourceful tyler of mahalo hooked us up with the talented mahalo daily team (yay russ!) mere hours before the actual shoot.
PK, a good friend of Soompi.com and hilarious comedian, was our go-to man for host. he always ready to drop a quick line and we are thrilled that he was able to join us.
we crowd-sourced the interview to our avid fans and let them ask the questions. we asked them to upload their submissions to youtube and you can see all the kids and even some blooper reels here. it looked like BoA really enjoyed seeing the questions direct from her fans:)
on our way out, we had an interesting discussion with kendell, one of BoA’s managers about how Asian pop stars attempt to break into the US market. interestingly, the concerns and issues are almost the same as international startups trying to break into the US market:)
we have been toying around with the idea of a monthly or bi-weekly video show which would cover Asian pop stars coming to the US, Asian American communities, like Koreatown or Daly City:), and Asian American hotspots. but at the moment, we are resource constrained. we will see how this one does viewership wise and see if it is worth allocating any resources to an ongoing video show. also, we will be exploring whether there is sufficient sponsorship interest. i will post our first video episode here once it is available.
a few hours ago, I received an email from a soompi team member stating that no ads were appearing on the site. i went to check it out and and sure enough, no ads to be seen – not adsense, not the default ad networks and not even the direct ad buys.
we run all of our ads through google ad manager, so i immediately went through their help section to figure out the issue. I ran the debugger and received this error: “Warning Fetching Ads from Google has been suppressed” which I googled and could not find any information.
I emailed for help and they said its likely the default ad networks not filling. thank you, but I’m not an idiot. Its one thing when a few ads appear blank and its another when every single ad on your site disappears. and that would not explain why the adsense and the direct buy ads are not appearing.
has anyone encountered this problem? it is so frustrating to deal with this situation and it has made me very aware of the key weakness in using Google as an ad server. Google, being such a large tech company with major tech products, does not react very quickly for customer support issues. Ever had your gmail go down – all you can do is sit and wait and pray to the tech gods. But, with ad servers, its a revenue issue. I have now lost an entire day in revenue and all i can do is sit and wait for google to rewrite me back.
i guess i should use this time to research other ad server options.