A network of six media titles, and the ad server that sells and counts every slot.
Trevor Stuckless built Wire, the media network his Hamilton, Ontario company Blue Crane Works owns and runs. It has six titles, from Local Wire's Hamilton and Burlington news to calculators and reference sites for contractors and homeowners. He also built the ad server behind it, which sells each placement directly for a fixed term with no auction, and counts views and clicks itself without cookies.
Why sell ads directly instead of through an ad exchange?
Because a direct buyer gets what an auction cannot give them: the slot, for the whole term, at the agreed price. On an exchange every impression is bid on again, and a competitor can outbid a placement halfway through a campaign.
On Wire the placement belongs to the buyer until the term ends. The two audiences, homeowners pricing work and contractors running businesses, are sold separately rather than blended into one large number that describes neither.
How are impressions and clicks counted?
By the publisher, under a published rule. An impression counts once at least half the ad has been on screen for one continuous second, the display viewability threshold used across the industry and set out in the Media Rating Council's guidelines. Clicks are counted at the redirect, and no cookies, visitor profiles or cross-site tracking are involved.
How does an advertiser know the inventory is real?
Every title publishes an ads.txt file, the IAB Tech Lab standard for declaring who is allowed to sell a site's advertising, and each names Blue Crane Works Inc. as the only authorised seller. With no exchange or reseller in between, nobody can sell the same slot twice.
What are the six titles?
| Title | Audience | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local Wire | Residents of Hamilton and Burlington | News written from council records and police releases | localwire.ca |
| Hamilton Home Costs | Homeowners pricing work | What home projects cost around Hamilton | hamiltonhomecosts.ca |
| Trades Tax Calculator | Self-employed trades, Canada-wide | Take-home pay and tax, province by province | tradestaxcalculator.ca |
| Ontario Trade Registry | Ontario contractors | Compliance, licensing and safety-log reference | ontariotraderegistry.ca |
| Blue Crane Works | Contractors running businesses | Software, systems and free contractor forms | bluecraneworks.ca |
| Sons Network | Faith-led small business owners | A platform for Kingdom-minded businesses | sonsnetwork.com |
What does advertising on Wire cost?
Placements are sold per title and per term, quoted directly with no auction (Wire). Each title also has its own advertise page with the options for that audience.
What else does Trevor build?
- Websites built to be foundMulti-page sites written from the owner's own facts, checked by a deploy gate on every release.
- AI and search visibilityProving, crawler by crawler, that Google, Bing, ChatGPT and the rest can read a site, then fixing what cannot.
- Business applicationsSoftware that runs the work itself: job-site records, parts and stock, paper archives.
- AI featuresAI that removes one specific chore: site walks to estimates, paper to documents, websites an assistant can use.
- Payments and billingStripe subscriptions, one-time passes, donations, and platform payouts to the people on a platform.
- Data pipelinesReading hundreds of public sources on a schedule and handing back one thing a person can act on.
- Scheduling and eventsCheck-ins, calendars, rosters and maps for gyms, a festival and a members community.
Talk to Trevor about advertising on Wire.
Describe what the business needs and what it is doing by hand today. You will get a straight answer on whether this is the right job for it, and what it would cost.