Overnight I had an email from the team at MediaWhiz who have just announced that they have merged two of their ad networks together (AuctionAds and ShoppingAds) under the one name of ShoppingAds.
What I like about the new look ShoppingAds is that it combines both CPA (cost per action) ads AND CPC (cost per click) ads into the one product.
There are two levels of publishers – Standard Publishers and Premium Publishers.
Standard publishers will only have the option for CPA ads while premium publishers get both depending upon where their traffic is from.
If you qualify as a Premium Publisher (from what I can tell they are promoted to Premium status based upon the ‘quality’ of traffic that the site has – not sure exactly what this means) you’ll have CPC ads served to all visitors from the USA and Canada and CPA ads to all other traffic. Here’s how they visualize it:
This makes a lot of sense to me. Other programs (like WidgetBucks) serve their normal ads to US traffic but to ‘international’ traffic they serve banner ads which pay out at CPM rates (per 1000 impressions). From what I’ve heard these CPM payouts are tiny and some of the banner ads are completely irrelevant to most sites and can be quite ugly.
ShoppingAds on the other hand continue to serve relevant ads whether they are showing CPC or CPA ads and they all have a consistent look about them. This will definitely be an option to experiment with if you have traffic from outside of the US.
I’m yet to test these on my sites – but will be doing so shortly. They have performed reasonably well for me previously though – particularly they’ve done quite well on sites with product related content.
For those of you already running AuctionAds on your blog – you don’t need to do anything to change to ShoppingAds. Your ads will continue to run as normal and the only real change is that there will be an ‘Ads by ShoppingAds’ link on your ads now.
Affiliate Bonus – The other thing I like about these ads is that if someone clicks the ‘Ads by ShoppingAds’ link on your ad unit and signs up as a publisher – you earn 5% of what they earn for the next 6 months.
I’ve had these on my blog before and it was alright. The text sometimes has a problem fitting into the ad space though, so you can’t see the price at the bottom. That was for a 125×125 size square. I prefer TTZ for my CPA ads though.
Justin Dupre
http://www.blogosis.com
Hi Darren,
It seem shoppingADs has good program specially for premium publishers. About WidgetBucks.. In my opinion they are no good anymore for us as we aren’t live in US or Canada.
Mido
why only for canada
It’s good to see options like this for blogs outside of the US. Will go down well on my site.
I’m signing up for ShoppingAds.com rignt now. Been exploring the possibility of placing more ads on my blog, but have yet to test out this one. Widgetbucks and Text Link Ads are some of the other ad companies / sites I’m considering.
I wonder though, if they accept ANY blog, or only blogs that have managed to hit a minimum web traffic volume.
Cheers, Samantha Tang
http://www.what-sells-online.com
Latest Post: 5 Steps to get Top Search Engine Rankings
I guess this is yet another attempt by MediaWhiz to revive both AuctionAds and ShoppingAds.
Combining them into one offering makes sense.
Its just a matter of time, to see if this will really succeed or not.
Am I the only one that once these changes took effect that things went downhill for? Seriously, i’m making less now from it than before and these weren’t making me much before as it was! Guess it’s time to ditch them… for me at least
I’m signing up now, looks good, anyone else had any experience with these to? Just to get some user reviews. Great post.
“For those of you already running AuctionAds on your blog – you don’t need to do anything to change to ShoppingAds. Your ads will continue to run as normal and the only real change is that there will be an ‘Ads by ShoppingAds’ link on your ads now. ”
I think you are wrong here… I had the code for the last 6 months on over 200 sites and now I have to change the freakin code all over the place! So no its not the same code and yes this is a **** in the *** to have to do that and a total turn off to see an ad network having such disregard for its affiliates!
If I had left the AuctionAds code in, I would have had a big black rectangle on all my pages which is again disappointing that such an ad network did that to its affiliates…
Dominic
My experience with ShoppingAds was that they simply closed their website a while back and no longer served the ads.
I wouldn’t want to touch them again as they didn’t have the business manners to notify publishers as to why this happened or as to what was going on.
Mike.
I like the sound of this, another one to go on my list.
Thanks for the info.
Regards.
Dominic – that’s not what the MediaWhiz blog says.
Another one I need a Paypal account for :(
sniff….
It does sound good though.
For the moment I am still capitalising on my other affiliate programs. Working on quality content, while my blog is largely unnoticed, then worrying about specifics later.
…it’s about time they merge; the marriage should work well.
http://www.24hourapartments.com
http://www.roommatesville.com
turftouch
I guess we’ll see how this works now, I might put them back up on some of my sites. I had it down because they weren’t converting that well.
Hi Darren,
Good luck on earning that 5% referral bonus. I had 122 AuctionAds referrals for ever and never saw a CENT from them.
Also, these referrals suddenly vanished when the two companies merged…
I ran AuctionAds on my blog, and during the conversion, the ads were down for about a day. Once the merger completed though, my ads were back up, didn’t have to change any code at all. However, I received a $25 sign up bonus with AuctionAds, and now my bonus is nowhere to be found. Hmm.
“Dominic – that’s not what the MediaWhiz blog says.”
Daren:
I am not sure what it says there but from personal experience, I see a black rectangle where my auctionads where showing properly before. Its happening on over 200 domains of mine so I would safely says that yes you need to change the code for the ads to show-up properly.
Thanks,
Dominic
AuctionAds has been a joke for months. But I kept it on a few pages so I could get my balance paid out. Then they merged the two programs and some of my earnings from previous months have disappeared. How convenient. It isn’t like they would ever make the mistake in the other direction, is it.
I had AuctionAds up for a while, and they never really made sense – it was always random junk from eBay that was only marginally related to the post topic. Has anyone else had better results in terms of relevance? Just because someone is reading a blog about, say, consumer digital cameras, doesn’t mean they’ll click an ad to buy a specific battery or something from eBay.
Very unhappy about the merge. Took me a week to realize that I was no longer getting credit for clicks – apparently in the merge my account was deleted so none of my clicks were counting. They wanted me to sign up from scratch and start over. Sorry, no. I wanted the auction ads, not a bunch of shopping ads for unrelated products.
If you’re already a ShoppingAds user, or considering becoming one, you should check out http://www.emptyspaceads.com (a product I left my full-time job at Microsoft to build), which allows you to put ShoppingAds units in your website’s empty space. After all, when was the last time you made any money from your site’s empty space?
We hope to add more ad networks soon! I invite you to try it out and send your honestly brutal feedback. Thanks!
-David Parkinson, emptyspaceads founder