Nuffnang

It is 3.30am and I am awake.

Not because I've been up all night working or partying but because it is time to announce the soft-launch of my leetle dotcom's website.

Ming consulted a Feng-Shui Master of some sort to come up with a "good date and time" for the launch of the website and unfortunately the good date came out to be 27th of February between 2am-4am.

So to all my dear readers, I now present to you what we've been working on for the past 6 months: Nuffnang
My inspiration to start Nuffnang came about from my Leng Mou days.

With a fast-growing readership, I found myself spending more and more time blogging so it only came naturally that I began to want to earn some advertising dollar from it.

I initially had a taste of the glamarous ad networks that scour the internet but found disappointment for a few reasons.

i) They didn't pay as much as I hoped for.

ii) I was annoyed that it took so long before I got my USD cheque and even after I received it and banked it in, it would take 2-4 weeks before I get my money (or whatever is left over after the bank has taken its commission).

iii) In some cases, I can't stand being paid in Paypal dollars that I find sooo hard to convert back to cold hard ringgit!

iv) I felt that the ads were often irrelevant to my local readers.

I promised myself that by the time I returned to Malaysia, if nobody had already started a website that brings the blogging community together to achieve the kind of advertising dollar that each blogger on his/her own can't possibly achieve, I would set about to do it.

So with the help of Ming, we started on our journey.

We spent a good deal of our time studying the business models of existing blog advertising networks like Blogads and we observed how most of these networks were set up only to serve advertisers to high-traffic blogs.

Blogs with small-medium sized traffic were neglected and for good economic reasons as well (they were just too small on their own to command any advertiser dollar).

That however, was something both Ming and I were not willing to accept. We envisioned a website that could offer a piece of the action to as many bloggers as we can, even those that have as low as 20 unique visits a day.

Attempting to cover these smaller blogs proved risky but we innovated and built a system that would solve the problems surrounding such an action.

Today, the Beta Version of our website is finally ready to be made public.

Starting from today, we will be gradually opening up our website to the initial group of prominent bloggers who have agreed to be the pioneers of this community (among which are Jeff Ooi, Kenny Sia, XES, Petertan, Rojaks, Shaolintiger, Suanie, Cheeserland, MasakMasak, Smashpop & Gang and a whole lot more).

In the mean time, to all my dear readers, please feel free to join our website and tell us what you think.

Note we're still in a Beta Stage so if you find any bugs, do e-mail us to let us know. And to show our appreciation of you helping us out, we're giving away prizes like an iPod Nano in our monthly lucky draws.Okay okay it is late and I think I'm going to resist telling you guys all about Nuffnang myself.

I'll save the rest for the coming blog entries.

Here's the URL
www.nuffnang.com.my