We use an internal chat system similar to Yammer where we discuss things, share articles we’ve enjoyed, and update each other on what we’re working on.

We also have a daily stand-up at 3pm, where we take turns to briefly list what we’ve been working on and raise issues we need help with. The stand-up is recorded and shared with Zolton, who works in the US (he sends us his own one at the end of his day).

As a distributed business with three offices, I thinks we do this kind of communication pretty well.

So it was nice to easily understand what the guys were working on each day.

Listening to the day’s stand-up during the 8 hour drive back home (it made for a nice change from Frère Jacques in the ...]]> I’m recently back from a holiday in Byron Bay (really great thank you; weather superb!). In between playing with the kids in the sand, flailing about on my mini-mal at the Pass, and enjoying the Byron outdoors, I kept an eye on what was happening within Conversant.

We use an internal chat system similar to Yammer where we discuss things, share articles we’ve enjoyed, and update each other on what we’re working on.

We also have a daily stand-up at 3pm, where we take turns to briefly list what we’ve been working on and raise issues we need help with. The stand-up is recorded and shared with Zolton, who works in the US (he sends us his own one at the end of his day).

As a distributed business with three offices, I thinks we do this kind of communication pretty well.

So it was nice to easily understand what the guys were working on each day.

Listening to the day’s stand-up during the 8 hour drive back home (it made for a nice change from Frère Jacques in the round, and round!) I was struck by what great people we have within Conversant.

Each person in the team was absorbed in their role and on top of what needed to be done that day. There was a real sense of camaraderie and fun. And the ideas and interactions were focused and smart.

Being removed and listening from afar, I was impressed! My first thoughts were: ‘what a great bunch of people’.

When I set-up Conversant in 2007 with my brother, Zolton, we had some vague idea of building a good business. I suppose if pressed I’d have said my goal was to have a growing, sustainable business that I enjoy managing each day. But if really pressed, I’m sure I’d have said that I wanted most of all to work with great people.

Today, traffic is growing, we have new offerings we’re bringing to the market, and revenue is strong. We have the makings of a great business.

But ultimately I think where we’ve really delivered is in our people.

It’s the people of Conversant Media who’ve achieved what we have to date and who will lead the next wave of our growth. In doing so, they will open up amazing opportunities for the growth of their skills and their roles within our business.

So apart from a healthy tan, the one thing I really took home from my Byron holiday was a reminder of how great the Conversant team is.

While it’s just two blocks away, we’re really excited by moving into a space that’s bright, beautiful, and better suited for us as a business.

We’ve filled it with new furniture, acquired a nice data pipe with fast WiFi, some cool lighting, signage, and dubbed it ‘A Bank of Ideas’.

We’re sharing the space on Level 1 with graphic designers Neon Zoo and architect Murray James – there’s also a hotdesk for any visiting folks who want to work in a collaborative space.

The best news? The ping pong table fits.

Oh, and the roof has a view…

Well we’re now throwing caution to the wind and our pixelated rules out the window. This digital publishing company will today do their first ever “mag drop”. That’s right – we’ve taken on the exclusive representation of Inc.com in the Australian market.

And with this comes magazines to share with our clients.

Phil and I will be dropping into agencies across Sydney over the next week with April copies of Inc. hot off the NYC presses, so if you’d like a copy or want to chat regarding Inc.com advertising opportunities in Australia, be sure to get in touch!

Of course every publisher in Sydney had the same idea… One planner announced that it was “Crazier than Christmas!” with all the chocolaty treats that were being delivered.

At Conversant we’re not shy about the fact that we’re one of the smaller publishers in the game of media.

So we were a bit chuffed when during one of our Easter drops – as I handed over our little Haighs packages and quietly said “it’s just something little” – a planner responded with: “that’s what you guys always do and that’s how we remember you…it may be small but it’s always the best quality”.

It made our day!

So in the course of any given month, we make millions of ‘people touch-points’.

Occasionally, we’ll start working with some of the people we reach and, as we grow and as they prove themselves as being indispensable, we look to hire them.

One of the things I often say to people who have an interest in joining our business is that most of the people have pulled their job from us: they got involved; they contributed immensely, and as their involvement grew we realised that they were a vital part of our team.

And so it’s with real pleasure that we welcome recent hires Online publishing is a great industry to be a part of. We work with interesting writers who create great content for our audiences to engage with. Our audience also share their content and comments with us. And they form a real community around our sites (on The Roar, for instance, we just published our 1 millionth comment). And we also work with agencies and brands to help them reach our readership.

So in the course of any given month, we make millions of ‘people touch-points’.

Occasionally, we’ll start working with some of the people we reach and, as we grow and as they prove themselves as being indispensable, we look to hire them.

One of the things I often say to people who have an interest in joining our business is that most of the people have pulled their job from us: they got involved; they contributed immensely, and as their involvement grew we realised that they were a vital part of our team.

And so it’s with real pleasure that we welcome recent hires Elise, Ben, Chad and Cormack to the team because each made themselves a compelling case to join Conversant Media.

Elise is our Digital Producer, but her initial involvement was just a small, one hour design job. She nailed it, so we gave her more, until she had so much flowing to her that we had to hire her.

Ben is our Sales Executive. Recently graduated and working in Bangkok, he contacted us on a whim for a job and made a strong case for himself. This included arriving in Sydney off his own accord for the final interview. Just as well that worked out well, Ben!

Chad has been helping with editorial on The Roar for a few years but really stepped up the past few months. He joins us 2.5 days a week while he completes his university degree.

And it’s fair to say that Cormack, the Lost At E Minor Australian Editor, is the smartest young guy the CM team have ever come across. Cormack blows us away with the depth of his knowledge and his propensity to learn. He’ll go on to do amazing things. We just had to get him more involved.

So today the Sydney team joined the Newcastle team on the sunny beaches of Merewether to tackle our next hat… ermmm task? Job? Nope, surf lessons!

We took to surfing like Clarky takes to the bat. Like the Chilli’s take to a stage. Like Warnie takes to Botox. Yup. Phenomenal to say the least.

Well not quite phenomenal on the performance front. We had some great laughs, some awesome wipeouts, and on the odd occasion we even stood up!

It was a great bonding day in Newcastle, assessing our position as a business and defining our goals for the upcoming year. It’s an exciting time to be part of a dynamic growing digital publishing business.

The digital market continues to grow and we endeavor to find ways to deliver unique ...]]> As many growing businesses may attest, each team member may have one title but we all wear many hats. At Conversant Media we pride ourselves on being well rounded. We embrace the latest micro business trends: using utility apps, Google search shortcuts – you name it.

So today the Sydney team joined the Newcastle team on the sunny beaches of Merewether to tackle our next hat… ermmm task? Job? Nope, surf lessons!

We took to surfing like Clarky takes to the bat. Like the Chilli’s take to a stage. Like Warnie takes to Botox. Yup. Phenomenal to say the least.

Well not quite phenomenal on the performance front. We had some great laughs, some awesome wipeouts, and on the odd occasion we even stood up!

It was a great bonding day in Newcastle, assessing our position as a business and defining our goals for the upcoming year. It’s an exciting time to be part of a dynamic growing digital publishing business.

The digital market continues to grow and we endeavor to find ways to deliver unique and compelling content across our sites. The imminent re-launch of Lost At E Minor is the first cab off the rank.

So it was a fantastic way to kick off what is sure to be an exciting year, one which will be filled with many more laughs, some occasional wipeouts and some stellar stand up moments!

Take it from us. Whether you’re a growing business like ours, or a team within a larger organisation, you need to stop and smell the roses occasionally, or go for a surf!

The set-up we have with them is for two dedicated servers. One for the web server front-end, and another for the database. Each has quad core servers.

Bulletproof are interested in your site and the software you’re using. In guys like Jeff Waugh, they have deep open source and WordPress skills which cascades down to your set-up. There’s serious technical knowledge behind the brand.

But what makes Bulletproof special is the way they abstract the server software from the hardware. Bulletproof employs virtual machines (VMs), which means the software needed to run your site is effectively decoupled from the hardware it sits on.

(By contrast, on traditional dedicated hosts, there’s a one to one relationship between your server hardware and your operating system and website.)

The benefits of VMs are many. If one machine fails, then your software is running on multiple other servers so ...]]> OK, so the title’s misleading: we’re not really bulletproof. But we are with Bulletproof as our hosts of The Roar. And the experience has been nothing short of amazing.

The set-up we have with them is for two dedicated servers. One for the web server front-end, and another for the database. Each has quad core servers.

Bulletproof are interested in your site and the software you’re using. In guys like Jeff Waugh, they have deep open source and WordPress skills which cascades down to your set-up. There’s serious technical knowledge behind the brand.

But what makes Bulletproof special is the way they abstract the server software from the hardware. Bulletproof employs virtual machines (VMs), which means the software needed to run your site is effectively decoupled from the hardware it sits on.

(By contrast, on traditional dedicated hosts, there’s a one to one relationship between your server hardware and your operating system and website.)

The benefits of VMs are many. If one machine fails, then your software is running on multiple other servers so they can pick up the load.

So there’s a lot of redundancy in the set-up, meaning there’s a lot of duplication, which allows for a better chance of staying up if one element fails. If the box your site runs on crashes, they swap in others from the server pool. It’s kinda magical stuff.

But the key benefit for us in this set-up is the ability for Bulletproof to quickly scale up the servers which power our site, should we need it.

I want to share a story on how powerful this set-up is for a business owner, and what a great mob Bulletproof are to have in your corner.

The Roar really comes alive during big sporting events. And there’s not much bigger than the Melbourne Cup.

We knew we’d get BIG traffic based on the previous year’s traffic. So I called up Bulletproof and gave them the friendly heads-up. All good, we agreed to keep an eye on the load, but we’d call if it looked like our servers couldn’t handle the load.

Then the traffic started to flow. By 9am we’d served 40,000 page impressions and traffic was increasing by the minute. The server was handling it all fine – in fact, due to the way we have our fragment and page caching set-up, our site speeds up substantially when we get big traffic flows.

Our content was really drawing people in. We live blogged the race and put up some great articles after the race (we had two staff at the Cup for the day). (We ended up being the biggest sports site in Australia on the day, twice the size of Foxsports according to the measurement company Effective Measure. We reaches around 250,000 unique browsers and served around a million pages in the day.)

By around 3.30pm the traffic was swelling into a tsunami of demand.

At one stage we had 20,000 people requesting content each second! Under this massive load, the site started to slow down.

As a media publisher, you live for the moment when you get MASSIVE traffic like this. It says your content is great. And business is driven from audience size.

So you love this moment. But also in the back of your mind is the fear your site will not be able to handle the demand.

It’s the single worst feeling as a publisher: having traffic so big it crashes your site. It hurts so much as you know you’re missing out on the audience, and you’re also letting down people seeking your content. If your site is down, thousands of people’s first experience of you is a broken page. Not good…

So I called Bulletproof.

The guy I spoke to saw the problem immediately (enormous traffic inflows) and said he needed to request some permission from his team to fix it. He was back in 30 seconds, and another 30 seconds later he’d increased our server capacity to 4 quad-core servers. In 30 seconds. Within minutes of calling, we had a server set-up that could handle almost any traffic load. My relief was palpable.

Our developer saw the alerts and jumped online. Here’s our chat:

3:24 PM
Ben: you’re getting ddos’d almost (denial of service – a way to crash a site via huge traffic requests)
Ben: are they adding more CPU to the VM?
me: got more CPUs
Ben: server is back online now
lets see how it goes
me: what an AWESOME mob bullet are
they did an extra 4 cpus for us in 1 min
seriously!!
wtf
Ben: yeh, times like this – show why they’re worth the money hey.
me: yep
Ben: http://bjm.alyte.net.au/X76F

The site went from being locked-up and unable to cope with the demand, to humming through the traffic. We had almost no downtime.

There are very few organisations that can so elegantly respond to this situation. And fewer where the team enjoy being able to solve these business and technical issues.

So, in a sense, there’s an element of ‘bulletproof‘ in our set-up. Thank you again, guys.

Here’s the video – it’s a small insight into our business and how we work.

Our Sales Manager Phil’s birthday was today. And Alana suggested a fun and technically interested way to mark it. Let’s serve side-skin ads on our sports site, The Roar, wishing him happy birthday.

We’re into targeting our media, so we served the ad to the IP range of Phil and Alana’s office in Surry Hills. This way, no wasted media (and no-one asking who the heck Phil was!).

And it’s a nice way to show that we can be clever about deploying media in targeted ways (office targeting? No problem!).

Here’s the ad we ran – apologies for the design. The MD is noted for design appreciation, but not for design execution.

Oh, and the destination site when you clicked the ads? Check it out, what better song to mark the ...]]> The office birthday. How do you mark someone in your team’s birthday in a memorable way and show them they’re an important part of who we are? Cupcakes – certainly helps, especially when they include Choclate Chai ones (Elise?). A card? Pass.

Our Sales Manager Phil’s birthday was today. And Alana suggested a fun and technically interested way to mark it. Let’s serve side-skin ads on our sports site, The Roar, wishing him happy birthday.

We’re into targeting our media, so we served the ad to the IP range of Phil and Alana’s office in Surry Hills. This way, no wasted media (and no-one asking who the heck Phil was!).

And it’s a nice way to show that we can be clever about deploying media in targeted ways (office targeting? No problem!).

Here’s the ad we ran – apologies for the design. The MD is noted for design appreciation, but not for design execution.

Oh, and the destination site when you clicked the ads? Check it out, what better song to mark the day?