GoSquared is 3 years old today. Wow time flies.

Usually, people take the opportunity to talk about their past when they are asked to speak on their birthday, without spending too much time dwelling on last year, I would like to spend a post on telling you about what we are doing right now, and will be carrying through over the next few months at GoSquared.

As you know, GoSquared owns and runs Liquidicity – this blog. We post as frequently as we can to feature design and technology news, and, when we have too much time, icons and other free resources for your enjoyment. We are very pleased with the growth of Liquidicity – it is our biggest source of traffic and has helped open many doors for us in the design world.

However, we started GoSquared on this day in 2006 to build a site where advertising could be as easy and as attractive as possible. We set out to build a simple way of enabling anyone to get seen online. 3 years on, 3 major updated versions overhauled, we still have the same aim.

In the first half of 2008 we introduced the most intelligent system we had ever built. Crucially, we introduced the ability for other websites to sell Squares via the GoSquared Network. People could suddenly purchase ads on other Sites with the same ease as before – uploading a 140×140 pixel image and assigning a title etc. then submitting. This is the system that is currently running for all members of GoSquared. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but we owe it to our constantly growing network of Sites to deliver more. We owe them more traffic, we owe them more advertising revenue. At the moment, the combination of Squares and the GoSquared Network is not good enough.

Since the first half of 2008, we’ve been working to improve on what we built. We’ve changed a lot, and there’s a lot still to do, but you can already see what has been keeping us so occupied by applying to the Private Beta now.

Changing the way we Price Advertising

Today, we will be introducing a major change to one of the most important factors for selling ads online – Pricing. Available tonight, we will be giving Private Beta testers the ability to choose between the current method of pricing (based on GoSquared Reputation) or to manually input prices that they believe their Site’s advertising space is worth to advertisers.

One of the problems with the way we currently charge for advertising is that we often don’t charge enough for some of our higher traffic Sites. By allowing Private Beta testers to manually input pricing figures, we will be able to utilise this information to improve the way we automatically price other Sites. In a way, we’re crowd sourcing ad prices – but it’s up to you whether you take the automatically calculated price or set your own values.

We have a couple of other things to show you today, but that’s just a small update on what’s going on with our core business – selling advertising.