A few newsy items from the last couple of days:
- WidgetBucks have announced that they’ll be moving to reporting revenue per click and revenue in real time – starting today. This was one of the main concerns that I”ve been hearing about the ad network – while they will still apply an audit to figures (you’ll see a ‘pending’ status on figures for a few days) it’s good to see them improving things. On WidgetBucks – how are people finding it’s performing? My tests in a couple of positions are showing that it’s earning more than AdSense for me and as much as Chitika – this is on a product blog where I’d suspect it will work best.
- Over at b5media we’re really excited this week with the beta launch of our new Entertainment Gateway Spekked. It draws content from our Entertainment channel and we’re launching with a competition with some cool prizes.
- Google today announced that their Trends tool is now being updated daily. This is a great tool for tracking how many people are searching online for different terms – incredibly useful if you’re researching a new blog topic.
- 9rules has launched their next version and it’s fantastic. Congratulations to the team there!
- ChrisG shares some insights on the topic of buying and selling blogs and particularly on ascertaining the value of a blog.
It is good to hear new news about widgetbucks. I recently got to know about this site at problogger.net and today i hear new news about this very site.
thanks for updating and doing all the hard work.
cheers.
I had heard of all the above websites, except 9rules, which i did check out. pretty cool.
Widgetbucks is outperforming Google and Chitika on my product related site. The earnings per click jumps around quite a bit but even the lowest average is still as good as chitika and better than google. So far, I am very pleased.
all these ad widgets seem to cater more to blogs/sites that have hardware reviews or similar…
I wish I could say that I installed the widgetbucks plugin but I’ve been dealing with blogbloat… I had over 50 plugins in my plugin folder and more than 30 activated… then my blog started to crawl, really crawl. Now I’ve excised 80% of them… I don’t want to install really unnecessary plugins anymore.
Have you suffered blogbloat or pluginaholism? If so head on over to my blog and see how I’m faring…
I don’t know how Darren deals with it, i think his server must be pretty powerful. Darren?
I guess I have to give widgetbucks a try now :)
I have moved widgetbucks to the bottom of one blog, and removed it from another for the time being. It seems like everyone is showing the same ads from them right now. I would love to see them expand the products.
None of the categories on Widgetbucks suits any of my blogs so I’m not surprised it’s not doing well. I’d say it should work well on technology blogs. I have however, gotten a couple of referals from it, so hopefully it’ll work for them!
I’m still waiting to see that $25 sign-up being awarded to me. It’s a week at this stage. Did anyone else find this or is this too long?
Still wondering if widget-bucks are going to give me a big time earning, it works quiet okay on one of my blog.
Hope to hear from a widget-bucks successor soon.
My experience with my measly blog is that WidgetBucks is up to 200 times better than AdSense.
It could be just a fluke, but I hope it’s not :)
Widgetbucks has been phenomenal for me! None of my blog posts are product related or reviews, but for some reason the ads have been popular.
My blog is only 10 days old and I didn’t add Widgetbucks to my site until 3 days later on 10/3/07. However, I’ve already earned $11.65 as of yesterday and you can imagine the paltry traffic a non buzz generating 10 day old blog gets.
Highly, highly recommended.
And hey, since my blog is only 10 days old everyone is more than welcome to visit ….;)
http://surfindad.com
I’m not sure what’s going on with my widgetbucks. Maybe the the reports are not up to date?
It says that I have 12 impressions and 0 clicks. How can I only have 12 impressions???? I’ve had a couple of 100 visitors since I installed the widget so that makes no sense at all.
My blog is about childbirth, and the closest widgetbucks category is baby articles which I’m showing, but I’m not sure how related that is to my readers.
Darren, How many adds would you say a blog should have on there site at one time. Clearly a sidebar can fit alot in it so how much is to much? There are alot of great advertisers out there would you try them all?
Thanks for the link up and kind words D man.
I just signed up with Widget a few days ago and the respond doesn’t seems gd… Hope for the better!
I’ve been using WidgetBucks for about a week or so now, and frankly, I’m not very impressed with them. Aside from their slow reporting, I can’t find an “account” page that shows all my earnings, nor have I seen anything about the $25 I was supposed to get just for signing up!
But I’m not giving up yet. I do like their ads, so I’m gonna give it a while longer to see how things go. I think they have great potential. I guess I’ve just been spoiled with the speed and detail Adsense gives in its reporting.
Brad you earnings are under the heading my widgets
That’s great news. I have seen someone already made over $120 within 21 hours.
Seems to work well so far. Only thing I have a problem with is the speed of the ad. It seems to take a bit to load.
Agreed, speed might be an issue sometimes. A more subtle animation would be nice too.
I will have to install widget bucks and give it a go. From what I have read they showed a lot of promise early but havn’t really lived up to the hype
I have some questions for those of you whose widget is performing well.
1. What is your blog about?
2. Which category WidgetBucks ads are you displaying?
3. Which type of ad did you place and where on the page did you place it?
I am trying to figure out why my ads are performing so poorly, and why I seem to have so little impressions, that don’t match the amount of page views I get.
I already emailed WidgetBucks about it and I am waiting for a response.
Darren,
I’ve been evaluating WidgetBucks on one of my sites as well, and I am getting similar performance numbers as what you’ve mentioned.
The payouts are quite good and switching some of my ad units over to WidgetBucks seems to be working very well so far.
I would also like to bring to your notice, another advertising network called TNX which sells Text Link Ads in a very different business model. I’ve blogged about it at:
http://onlinepresence.blogsailor.com/2007/10/08/review-of-tnxnet-after-1-week-of-usage/
~Anuj
I read on some blogs that Widgetbucks is not a recommended Ads because of it’s poor system and not so good income, many people were disappointed and some of them then move it to the bottom of their website and so do i. Is there any comment on this?
I hope widgetbucks also put statistics for the referrals more than it is now the only thing you know is that “you have xxx referrals” but we need more statistics.
And congratulations for the spekked ;)
I actually found this not to be too effective, since the categories that they offer only have a small amount of advertisers listed in them.
Google AdSense has more, which I find more compensating.
Thanks,
Richard