Get To Know Ben Ilfeld

Ben is Lead Audience & Revenue Strategist at 10up, a full service digital agency focused on creating amazing web and content management experiences with a passionate team of 135+ full-time strategists, designers and engineers working around the globe.

Ben has over 10 years of experience as an entrepreneur, publisher and innovator, that make him well suited to 10up’s monetization, content conversion, and ad ops business. He led product development, analysis and iterative design processes, while overseeing all business operations at The Sacramento Press and AdGlue. Ben has consistently stepped over the edge to experiment with new models for creating healthy media ecosystems.

In 2008, Ben launched The Sacramento Press as a new breed of local publication dedicated to rethinking how media interacts with a local audience. In just a few years, his team built an army of over 1,500 volunteer community contributors. During this time, Ben built the first independent online local ad network (SLOAN) that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for over 60 publishers. He was also a founding board member of the Local Independent Online News publishers (LION).

We’re thrilled Ben will be speaking at WordCamp Sacramento 2016 on Debugging the Website Money Maker!

Speaker Q&A With Ben

To help you learn even more about Ben, we asked him to answer a few questions for us, some WordPress-related, and some others we think you’ll appreciate 🙂 Be sure to give him a shout out on Twitter and don’t forget to use our hashtag #wcsac.

What inspired you to give this talk at WordCamp?

I know firsthand the stress and frustration of having “everything done but the ads” and then seeing that last mile grow ever longer.

However, out of that stress I’ve learned that a defined troubleshooting approach, regular communication and a couple nifty tools make all the difference.

This talk will help shorten and ease that process for engineers, ad operations and publishers.

How did you discover WordPress?

We built The Sacramento Press on a custom CMS called Midtown. While I still have love for a carefully crafted CMS, over the years I noticed that WordPress was maturing into a flexible platform for community journalism.

We began the transition to WordPress in 2012 to lower our technology overhead and the move positioned us better for a sale of the business in 2013.

10up was the agency I chose for that migration and it worked out so well, I ended up working at 10up only a couple of years later!

How has WordPress Or WordCamp impacted you?

Personally, WordPress allowed me to pass the baton at The Sacramento Press.

It also allows for an incredible variety and number of new entrants who keep our media ecosystem growing. The health of that ecosystem is my passion and supporting those publishers is my mission.

How do you primarily work with WordPress?

I work in an agency setting where I collaborate with visual designers, user experience strategists, project managers and engineers in order to solve complex challenges using WordPress.

My role is to help our clients see a return on their technology investment. With media clients, that often involves optimizing ad technologies and configurations. Much of my work is in gap between WordPress and an ad manager (usually DoubleClick for Publishers).

What does the WordCamp theme Discovery mean to you?

There is a false perception that discoveries come from an innate creative spark in a vacuum. I’ve found that discovery is more likely the result of pressure, circumstance and hard work.

Even though it can be extremely stressful, discoveries I’ve made debugging complex ad systems have also been the most rewarding.
But if you want to discover and learn under these extreme conditions, you’ve got to have a framework to attack the challenges.

I’ll provide that framework where analysis and creativity in these pressure filled situations result in positive outcomes and useful new insights.

What is the latest book you read?

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

What is your favorite restaurant? Favorite menu item?

Kru, Pork Belly and Uni.

What TV series are you current binging on/into?

Mr. Robot, The Great British Baking Show.

What do you do for fun?

Outside of work, I have a toddler. He loves the park, the Zoo and Fairytale Town. But most of all he loves riding the light rail — we do that a lot.