It started one night in May with a simple thought.

“Why does everyone hate advertising?”

The actual principle of advertising is sound: provide a solution that allows the writer to generate revenue and give away their content for free while providing publicity for the advertiser. Essentially, advertising should allow you, the reader, to get better content.

Then, this little thing called “Flash” was developed.

And the advertisers said “Hey, everyone has this installed on their browsers, let’s make our ads flashy. And bouncy. And interactive”. Slowly, we became desensitized to the ads because a) they weren’t appealing to us, and b) treated us like we had the attention span of 2 year olds.

And then stuff like this happens.

We wanted to create something better—a solution that would benefit the writers, advertisers, and the readers. While there are some rare exceptions to traditional advertising, they are way out of the league of the average blogger and advertiser. We wanted to open up premium advertising to a whole new market of websites and advertisers.

Enter Fusion Ads.

The idea: take a bunch of websites with a similar audience, and bring them together to provide a way for advertisers to distribute their messages to a targeted audience. The end result: beautiful, relevant ads that don’t detract from the content on the site.

There are a couple conditions to these advertisements:

• Only a single ad will be shown per page.
• Ads will consist only of relevant products and services.

• There are a set number of ad spots per month, and each ad receives an equal slice of the network’s traffic over a given month.

• Animation is verboten.

To quote the Fusion website:

While this is contrary to the traditional wisdom of advertising — cramming as many ads as possible on a page — we believe that the value of Fusion’s ads are that they’re exclusive. With a single, unobtrusive ad shown on each page, sponsors don’t have to compete for attention among other advertisers, and readers don’t feel insulted by flashy banner ads.

If you are interested in purchasing an ad on the Fusion network, there are limited spots available for December and January.

Thanks

I want to take a quick moment to offer my sincere thanks to all those who made Fusion possible: from fledgling concept to completion. These are all wiser, smarter, and more talented people than myself that have pushed me along, and have helped fix some of the mistakes I made.

• Chris Bowler: helped me keep my sanity
• Shawn Blanc: told us when we were doing something wrong
• Cameron Hunt: came up with the exceptional design of the Fusion site
• Chris Thomson: mastermind behind the adserver

Also, thanks to all the bloggers and advertisers that chose to trust and partner with us for the very first month. I think we’ve truly come up with something great.