Ads on Dribbble: New Prices Starting at $250

We recently changed our ad pricing and are now booking ads for July. Details can be found here:

http://dribbble.com/site/advertise

We tinkered with prices and traffic blocks in hopes of increasing appeal to smaller businesses, particularly those that want to experiment at a lower price point to see if their ads on Dribbble are effective. In addition to the new prices, here are some known knowns:

• Dribbble has high volume traffic and is growing; we’ve already served more ad impressions in June (2,791,170 through the 23rd) than May (2,567,313) with still 7 days remaining in the month.
• Dribbble has high quality traffic; a ridiculously talented, savvy audience of designers and other web professionals frequent the site.

With our growth, audience and new prices, we think advertising on Dribbble is a slam dunk. At $250, it’s now easy to find out for yourself.

- Posted by Rich

Hey June

It’s been too long since we’ve posted what *we* are working on. Here are some highlights from the last 3 weeks:

• Improvements in our deployment infrastructure. Only time will tell how @gruber-proof we are, but we’ve added capacity and our servers are running cool despite increased traffic. To inifinity and beyond?! Still working on it, but we’re in a much better place than we were a month ago.
• Comments are commendable. You can like comments to show appreciation for feedback, humor, etc. We have further plans to draw attention to good comments and the players who make them, but merely adding likes for comments gives us a corpus of data from which to begin the work of highlighting those worthy of, um, comment.
• Follow up comments now appear in the incoming activity stream. Many people asked us for the ability to be alerted to comments following their own so they’d be able to keep track of discussions. Our first step to address this was to add follow up comments to the incoming activity stream. (In case you didn’t know, there is an RSS feed for this stream; it is arguably the best way to keep abreast of everything happening in your Dribbblesphere.) This has been well received by some, less so by others. We realize that the volume and utility of this feature varies by user. We wanted to push it in its simplest form and get a sense of usage; we’ll be refining it so you can customize to taste going forward.
• Notifications (tab under the Account page). You can now sign up to receive email notifications for certain events at Dribbble. The first set of events are 1) a comment on one of your shots and 2) being followed. We’ll be adding more going forward. Notification of likes and follow up comments are likely candidates to go next.
• Simpler login. We used to get a surprising (at least to me) number of requests for help logging in. Usually the issue was that someone created a login containing capital letters (damn you, iPhone) and tried to login using all lowercase. A postgres function and index later, login is now case-insensitive. Additionally, you can login using your email address (also case-insensitive). Hopefully this marks the end of login difficulties. So say we all.

Upcoming? This week we’re working on refactorings and performance improvements. We have a mountainous backlog of annoyances and enhancements to plow through. We know that folks are salivating - dare I say dribbbling - for an API. We have the unsavory business of making money so I don’t have to get a real job. And we have BIG NEW SECRET STUFF in the early stages of development. We’ll post a few shots along the way … if we can find a good site for that sort of thing.

- Posted by Rich

Stepping Up Our Game

Dribbble began way back in 2008 as a little side project between two Salem, MA neighbors whose kids played together. As luck would have it, Dan and I happened to be web enthusiasts with complementary skills. We both had jobs and kids, and then we had two kids, so time to work on our idea was scarce. Progress was slow. But always enjoyable.

In 2009, we decided we had built enough to invite some folks to try it out and see if the idea of sharing small screenshots of design work resonated. People came, and though the number of users was small, the content was dazzling. (For proof, check out the inimitable Shaun Inman and the progression of his game, Mimeo, that has captivated Dribbblers for the past 6 months.) It wasn’t long before we realized that the designers who had assembled in Dribbble were producing something special: A sparkling, real-time window of the web as it was being rendered.

We grew our membership slowly to preserve the quality of our content and community. But also, frankly, to keep the site manageable given constraints on our time. As Dribbble drew more users, shots and attention, we were thrilled. The list of features and possibilities for the community began to seem endless; simultaneously, our flaws became more noticeable and irritating. Though a labor of love, there just wasn’t much spare time in our lives to work on Dribbble.

Recently, circumstances changed - my son was in school longer, my baby daughter was now a toddler and my wife was offered a full-time, work-at-home writing job (after years of staying home with the kids). We saw opportunities on many fronts - career, lifestyle, independence. And Dribbble. We decided to take a risk. I left my job and, on Monday, became the first full-time employee at Dribbble.

It wasn’t an easy decision. I had been working for the last 3 years at PatientsLikeMe where they are - for real, not in press releases - changing the future of health care. I am forever indebted to them for giving me an opportunity to work on something truly meaningful and great. If you’re a software developer in the Boston area and want to use Ruby on Rails to build software that has significant impact on people’s lives, I hope you’ll consider working at PatientsLikeMe which is looking for Experienced Ruby on Rails Developers.

As for Dribbble, what does the change mean? Engineering resources have been our primary bottleneck, so we’ll be able to ramp up the time we spend improving Dribbble by a factor of ~10. We have hundreds of ideas to improve the site and suddenly more time to advance them. Here are some highlights of what we’ll be doing in the near future:

• Publishing the first portion of the Dribbble API.
• Growing the community. We’ll be issuing another round of invitations soon. We’re still obsessed with the quality of our content and community, but we have more time to invest in monitoring growth and releasing features to help the community manage itself. We’re long overdue for an expansion and now in a better position to manage it.
• Fixing bugs. (We need to get those comment hyperlinks hyperlinking! And many others.)
• Building new features. The community has given us incredible feedback and we have many ideas of our own. Plus you need to be able to see follow-up comments after you comment. (That makes me weep, too. Sorry.)
• Writing. We not only have more time to work on Dribbble, but also to write about it. It’s fun, we love this community and want to be more transparent about what *we* are working on. We now have time to be more active in doing so.

One final, but important, note: We owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to our advertisers who took a chance on a new platform. Without ad revenue, I could not have taken the risk to do this full-time. If you haven’t already, please check out the advertising page where our current advertisers are displayed on the right. Simply click through and buy all their products :)

http://dribbble.com/site/advertise

Now back to practice so we have more to show on the court. 1 … 2 … 3 … DEE-FENSE!

Fist bumps,

Rich
Employee #1

A Commercial Break

Have a product or service you’d like our vibrant, focused community of designers, developers and creatives to check out? We’ve published new rates and traffic data from our first two weeks of being publicly viewable, and we’re lining up advertising slots for May. Book a spot today.

Also, a big thank you to all of our current advertisers, who’ve taken a leap of faith with us during our inaugural month. You’re helping us continue to make Dribbble awesome.

Making Its Debut: Debuts

One criticism Dribbble has received is that it’s a star system; well-known players get far more views and dominate the popular lists, making it difficult for talented but lesser-known players to draw fans. It’s a valid concern.

While stars will always shine in reputation theater, we very much want Dribbble to be a stage for discovering new talent. On that front, there’s a lot we can do. To start, we’ve added a ”Debuts” tab to the front page which displays the opening (first) shot from each new player.

http://dribbble.com/shots/debuts

Rookies, your first shot just got a lot more visibility, so make it a swish. Players, we encourage you to keep tabs on this tab to scout the influx of new talent. (There’s an RSS feed as well, which makes doing so a layup.) When you see a rookie do something special, lavish Like and affection. Because once upon a time, someone gave you your first shot.

Advertise on Dribbble

Looking to reach a vibrant, focused community of designers and other web creatives?

Dribbble is offering a rotating sidebar advertising module that houses a standard, 120×90 image plus a short line of text. We’re gearing up for our upcoming public launch by lining up advertising slots this week.

WHY BUY A SPOT NOW?

We’ll be putting all the marketing wheels in motion to promote the launch on the following channels:

• simplebits.com ~100,000 unique visitors per month
• twitter.com/simplebits 19,100+ followers 
• twitter.com/dribbble 3,162+ followers 
• twitter.com/wrycoder 400+ followers (Yeah, baby! :) 
• Right here at blog.dribbble.com

Interested? Email contact [at] dribbble dot com for more info.