Friday, March 23, 2007

adMad Update

Hitting a high
It’s been just eight weeks that we launched the new adMad but we have already crossed 10,000 hits. Thanks guys for all the support you have been giving us and we are expecting the same or even more to continue. Do keep visiting adMad to view the daily ads and do attempt the trivia question for the day whilst you are here and browse the repository we have here. And of course, do spread the word around. Send in your suggestions to 2creativeads@gmail.com. We are all ears to hear you. :-)

We got a lot of ads send in to us by various people. Ramya, Devadas, Royster, to name a few. We have posted some of those in adMad and the remaining will follow suite. Thanks to you guys. Keep sending more to 2creativeads@gmail.com. :-)

How do we select the winner?
Anish was curious to know about how we decide on the winner of a trivia. So lemme share with you guys how we are doing it @ adMad. :-)

Initially we thought of posting the names of all those who got their answers correct. But then, when we thought about the blog becoming famous and subsequently leading to a deluge of correct answers (agreed, we aimed high :p), we envisaged a practical difficulty in writing the names of all the winners. So we decided to have only one winner for a particular trivia right from day one.

Now how do we select that one lucky person? As you all know it’s pretty out-dated a technique to decide on the winner through a lucky dip and all; what we do is something like this.

We write the names of all those who get their answer correct in an excel sheet and give the names a number starting from one. Then we use the Rand () function in excel to generate a random number. As you know, this function gives a decimal value between zero and one. The first digit after the decimal shall decide the winner if the winner count is less than 10 and the first two digits if the winner count is less than 100 and so on. It hardly takes two minutes time, is simple and is scalable and so did we adhere to it! :p

Only the first value generated by the rand function is taken into consideration for deciding the winner. We go for a refresh of Rand () function in situations like, there are only 4 correct answers and the first digit after decimal is greater than 4, occur.

To give you an example, if these four get their answers correct,
1. Anish
2. Glenn
3. Suresh
4. Div

And if Rand () = 0.31562, then the winner would be 3, i.e. Suresh.

That’s all guys and we hope that adMad keeps rocking and hits more highs in its onward course...

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