Timothy Tiah. Executive Director of Nuffnang.

Launched in February 2007, Nuffnang Sdn Bhd is a blog advertising community initiated by Timothy Tiah Ewe Tiam and Cheo Ming Shen @ Tong Ming Shen. In just few months, it have managed to accumulate more then 1700 people signing up with their website. We asked Mr. Timothy Tiah, Nuffnang’s Executive Director about this his pet project.
( This interview was originally posted on 1st Jun 2007 )
Q: First of all, who are behind Nuffnang?

A: The public face of Nuffnang is my partner Ming and I. However, there are a lot of other shareholders in Nuffnang, from the company employees to even a select group of bloggers who have become partners. Ming and I really can’t take credit for whatever Nuffnang has achieved thus far.

Q: How did the whole project start?
A: started off as a blogger and an entrepreneur that founded a non-profit tuition matching service called Tuitionhamster.com. Back then, I was looking for ways to market Tuitionhamster.com when I came across the relatively untapped advertising medium of blogs.

I started off by writing to a few bloggers and asked if they would help link or promote Tuitionhamster.com and it worked… it worked so well I couldn’t believe it. I knew there was something we could do about it. I knew that blogs could lead the way in a revolutionary new channel of online advertising.

Q: Are there any problems or obstacle that you have to endure during the early stages, when you first start this company?

A: I would still consider Nuffnang relatively new and yes we still have our problems and obstacles, some that we have overcome and some that we are still striving to fix. For example, when we first started off, we never expected so many bloggers to come join the Nuffnang Community so quickly. Our servers overloaded over and over again and our website took ages to load anything. Fortunately, after adding on hardware and optimizing our code, we have solved this problem.

The obstacle that we are still fighting to overcome today is the oversupply of blog advertising spaces and advertiser demand that is still unable to keep up. We have had bloggers join us from everywhere, over 1,700 bloggers to date and we have been trying very hard to start campaigns which include all these blogs but what many people seem to overlook is that deals with advertisers are not closed within a few days or even a week, they take up to a month or two from the day you walk into the advertiser’s office to the day the we get “The GO” from advertisers. Not to mention, much of our job is in trying to convince the advertisers why advertising online is the way to go in this new age.

Q: What is Nuffnang corporate mission? From which company do you got your inspiration? Which company have been a model for Nuffnang?

A: Nuffnang’s mission is to build not just a vast blog advertising network to give local advertisers a new channel of advertising but also to build a united community of bloggers in Malaysia and Singapore, a community with growing influence.

There hasn’t’ really been any particular company that Nuffnang is modeled after. What we do is that we take different examples of many companies and put them into our culture. For example, we try very hard to emulate the Google culture at our workplace with employee benefits that can be very unconventional but still fun to have.

Q: How do you your advantages, compare to other Internet advertising company that sell similar services as Nuffnang?

A: We are a local blog advertising community that targets local advertisers. Not only that, we are not alike any similar services such as contextual based ad networks or pay per post websites. We are a little bit of Blogads, a little bit of Pay Per Post and a little bit of a MySpace community.

Q: How many publisher and advertiser have sign-up with Nuffnang to date?

A: We have had over 1,700 bloggers sign up with our Malaysian website alone. Our Singapore website www.nuffnang.com.sg which was just launched and is managed by our Singaporean Office has also received a considerable number of sign-ups in just a week after it’s launch. When it comes to advertisers, we have had more than 10 advertisers ranging from SMEs to even large bluechip companies like MyEG, Pensonic, MPH and Kurnia.

Q: How are the feedback that you get from publishers and advertisers?

A: The bloggers we’ve been able to deal with seem to love the community aspect of Nuffnang, so much that we even have bloggers e-mailing is sometimes asking how they can help us improve our community. That is indeed very very moving.

On the other hand, advertiser interest in what we have to offer has been very overwhelming with many advertisers even coming back to run more campaigns with us.

I foresee that Nuffnang 1 year from now will be a formidable blog advertising solution for many local advertisers and also allowing many bloggers to earn a decent side income

Q: About your advertising strategy. I’ve come to know about this company bu accident, while surfing. Will you do any above the line advertising? What is your strategy?

A: When it comes to marketing, we have two aspects: Marketing to bloggers and marketing to advertisers. Fortunately for us, in terms of bloggers, the viral effect of the blogosphere has allowed us to grow fast enough without the need to do any marketing at all. At Nuffnang, we have been very very lucky to have the support of the blogging community.

As for marketing to advertisers, we mostly deal with them on a face-to-face basis because we are not only interested in selling our ads and closing the deal. We’re interested to see how well blog advertising works and how we could possibly move to increase its effectiveness. That’s why we spend much time building relationships with advertisers in the hope of gaining useful feedback and suggestions.

Q: What is your expectation, one year from now?

A: I foresee that Nuffnang 1 year from now will be a formidable blog advertising solution for many local advertisers and also allowing many bloggers to earn a decent side income. However, most importantly, one year from now I dream to see a very close-knit community of bloggers that were brought together by Nuffnang.

Website: http://nuffnang.com

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